Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 3 of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain's The
Foundations of the 19th century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
174
THIRD CHAPTER
THE REVELATION OF CHRIST
By the virtue of One
all
have been truly saved.
MAHÂBHÂRATA.
INTRODUCTORY
BEFORE our
eyes
there stands a vision, distinct, incomparable. This picture which we
behold
is the inheritance which we have received from our Fathers. Without an
accurate appreciation of this vision, we cannot measure and rightly
judge
the historical significance of Christianity. The converse, on the other
hand, does not hold good, for the figure of Jesus Christ has, by the
historical
development of the Churches, been dimmed and relegated to the
background,
rather than unveiled to the clear sight of our eyes. To look upon this
Figure solely by the light of a church doctrine, narrowed both in
respect
of place and of time, is voluntarily to put on blinkers and to narrow
our
view of the eternally Divine. The vision of Christ, moreover, is hardly
touched upon by the dogmas of the Church. They are all so abstract that
they afford nothing upon which either our understanding or our feelings
can lay hold. We may apply to them in general what an artless witness,
St. Augustine, said of the Dogma of the Trinity: “But we speak of three
Persons, not because we fancy that in so doing we have uttered
something,
but simply
175 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
because we cannot be silent.“ * Surely
we are guilty of no outrage upon due reverence if we say, it is not the
Churches that constitute the might of Christianity, for that might is
drawn
solely from the fountain head from which the churches themselves derive
all their power — the contemplation of the Son of Man upon the Cross.
Let us therefore
separate the vision of Christ upon earth from the whole history of
Christianity.
What after all are
our nineteen centuries for the conscious acceptance of such an
experience
— for the transformation which forces itself through all the strata of
humanity by the power of a fundamentally new aspect of life's problems?
We should remember that more than two thousand years were needed before
the structure of the Kosmos, capable as it is of mathematical proof and
of demonstration to the senses, became the fixed, common possession of
human knowledge. Is not the understanding with its gift of sight and
its
infallible formula of 2x2=4 easier to mould than the heart, blind and
ever
befooled by self-seeking? Here is a man born into the world and living
a life through which the conception of the moral significance of man,
the
whole philosophy of life, undergoes a complete transformation — through
which the relation of the individual to himself, to the rest of
mankind,
and to the nature by which he is surrounded, is of necessity
illuminated
by a new and hitherto unsuspected light, so that all motives of action,
all ideals, all heart's-desires and hopes must be remoulded and built
up
anew from their very foundations. Is it to be believed that this can be
the work of a few centuries? Is it to be believed that this can be
brought
about by misunderstandings and lies, by politic intrigues and
oecumenical
councils, at the word of command of kings maddened by ambition, or of
greedy
priests,
*
“Dictum
est tamen tres personae, non ut aliquid diceretur, sed ne taceretur.“ —
De
Trinitate, V. chap. ix.
176 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
by three thousand volumes of scholastic
disputations, by the fanatical faith of narrow-minded peasants and the
noble zeal of a small number of superior persons, by war, murder and
the
stake, by civic codes of law and social intolerance? For my part I
disclaim
any such belief. I believe that we are still far, very far, from the
moment
when the transforming might of the vision of Christ will make itself
felt
to its utmost extent by civilised mankind. Even if our churches in
their
present form should come to an end, the idea of Christianity would only
stand out with all the more force. In the ninth chapter I shall show
how
our new Teuton philosophy is pushing in that direction. Even now,
Christianity
is not yet firm upon its childish feet: its maturity is hardly dawning
upon our dim vision. Who knows but a day may come when the bloody
church-history
of the first eighteen centuries of our era may be looked upon as the
history
of the infantile diseases of Christianity?
In considering the
vision of Christ, then, let us not allow our judgment to be darkened by
any historical delusions, or by the ephemeral views of our century. We
may be sure that up to the present we have only entered upon the
smallest
portion of this same inheritance, and if we wish to know what is its
significance
for all of us, be we Christians or Jews, believers or unbelievers,
whether
we are conscious of our privilege or not — then must we in the first
place
stop our ears against the chaos of creeds and of blasphemies which
beshame
humanity, and in the next place raise our eyes up to the most
incomparable
vision of all times.
In this section I
shall be forced critically to glance at much that forms the
intellectual
foundation of various religions. But just as I leave untouched that
which
is hidden in the Holy of Holies of my own heart, so I hope to steer
clear
of giving offence to any other sensible man. It is as easy to separate
the historic vision of
177
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
Christ from all the supernatural
significance
which dwells in it as it must be to treat Physics upon a purely
material
basis without imagining that in so doing we have dethroned Metaphysics.
Christ indeed can
hardly be spoken of without now and again crossing the boundary; still
belief, as such, need not be touched, and if I as historian proceed
logically
and convincingly, I can bear with any refutation which the reader may
bring
forward as a question of feeling, as apart from understanding. With
this
consciousness I shall speak as frankly in the following chapters as I
have
done in those which have gone before.
THE
RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE
The religious
faith
of more than two-thirds of all the inhabitants of the earth to-day
starts
from the life on earth of two men, Christ and Buddha, men who lived
only
a few centuries ago. We have historical proofs of their having actually
existed, and that the traditions regarding them, though containing much
that is fabulous and uncertain, obscure and contradictory, nevertheless
give us a faithful picture of the main features of their real lives.
Even
apart from this sure result of the scientific investigations of the
nineteenth
century, * men of acute and sound judgment will never have doubted the
actual existence of these great moral heroes: for although the
historical
and chronological material regarding them is extremely scanty and
imperfect,
yet their moral and intellectual individuality stands out so clearly
and
brilliantly before our eyes, and this individuality is so incomparable,
that it could not be
*
The
existence of Christ was denied even in the second century of our era,
and
Buddha till twenty-five years ago was regarded by many theologians as a
mythical figure. See, for example, the books of Sénart
and
Kern.
178 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
an invention of the imagination. The
imagination of man is very narrowly circumscribed; the creative mind
can
work only with given facts: it was men that Homer had to enthrone on
Olympus,
for even his imagination could not transcend the impassable boundary of
what he saw and experienced; the very fact that he makes his gods so
very
human, that he does not permit his imagination to soar to the realm of
the Extraordinary and Inconceivable (because never seen), that he
rather
keeps it in subjection, in order to employ its undivided force to
create
what will be poetical and visible, is one of a thousand proofs, and not
the least important one, that intellectually he was a great man. We are
not capable of inventing even a plant or animal form; when we try it,
the
most we do is to put together a monstrosity composed of fragments of
all
kinds of creatures known to us. Nature, however, the inexhaustibly
inventive,
shows us a new thing whenever it so pleases her; and this new thing is
for our consciousness henceforth just as indestructible as it formerly
was undiscoverable. The figure of Buddha, much less that of Jesus
Christ,
could not be invented by any human poetical power, neither that of an
individual
nor that of a whole people; nowhere can we discover even the slightest
approach to such a thing. Neither poets, nor philosophers, nor prophets
have been able even in their dreams to conceive such a phenomenon.
Plato
is certainly often mentioned in connection with Jesus Christ; there are
whole books on the supposed relation between the two; it is said that
the
Greek philosopher was a forerunner who proclaimed the new gospel. In
reality,
however, the great Plato is a quite irreligious genius, a metaphysician
and politician, an investigator and an aristocrat. And Socrates! The
clever
author of grammar and logic, the honest preacher of a morality for
philistines,
the noble gossip of the Athenian gymnasia, — is he not in every respect
179 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
the direct contrast to the divine
proclaimer
of a Heaven of them “that are poor in spirit“? In India it was the
same:
the figure of a Buddha was not anticipated nor conjured up by the magic
of men's longing. All such assertions belong to the wide province of
that
delusive historic philosophy which constructs after the event. If
Christ
and Christianity had been an historical necessity, as the neoscholastic
Hegel asserts, and Pfleiderer and others would have us believe to-day,
we should inevitably have seen not one Christ but a thousand Christs
arise;
I should really like to know in what century a Jesus would not have
been
just as “necessary“ as our daily bread? * Let us therefore discard
these
views that are tinged with the paleness of abstraction. The only effect
they have is to obscure the one decisive and pregnant thing, namely,
the
importance of the living, individual, incomparable personality. One is
ever and anon forced to quote Goethe's great saying:
- Höchtes Glück der
Erdenkinder
- Ist nur die Persönlichkeit!
The circumstances in which the
personality
is placed — a knowledge of its general conditions in respect of time
and
space — will certainly contribute very much towards making it clearly
understood.
Such a knowledge will enable us to distinguish between the important and
*
Hegel
in his Philosophie der Geschichte, Th. III., A. 3, chap. ii.,
says
about Christ: “He was born as this one man, in abstract subjectivity,
but
so that conversely finiteness is only the form of his appearance, the
essence
and content of which is rather infiniteness and absolute
being-for-self....
The nature of God, to be pure spirit, becomes in the Christian religion
manifest to man. But what is the spirit? It is the One, the unchanging
infinity, the pure identity, which in the second place separates itself
from itself, as its second self, as the being-for-itself and
being-in-itself
in opposition to the Universal. But this separation is annulled by
this,
that the atomistic subjectivity, as the simple relativity to itself, is
itself the Universal, Identical with itself.“ What will future
centuries
say to this clatter of words? For two-thirds of the nineteenth it was
considered
the highest wisdom.
180 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
the unimportant, between the
characteristically
individual and the locally conventional. It will, in short, give us an
increasingly clearer view of the personality. But to explain it, to try
to show it as a logical necessity, is an idle, foolish task; every
figure
— even that of a beetle — is to the human understanding a “wonder“; the
human personality is, however, the mysterium magnum of life,
and
the more a great personality is stripped by criticism of all legendary
rags and tatters, and the more successful that criticism is in
representing
each step in its career as something fore-ordained in the nature of
things,
the more incomprehensible the mystery becomes. This indeed is the final
result of the criticism to which the life of Jesus has been submitted
in
the nineteenth century. This century has been called an irreligious
one;
but never yet, since the first Christian centuries, has the interest of
mankind concentrated so passionately around the person of Jesus Christ
as in the last seventy years; the works of Darwin, however widespread
they
were, were not bought to one-tenth the extent of those of Strauss and
Renan.
And the result of it all is, that the actual earthly life of Jesus
Christ
has become more and more concrete, and we have been compelled to
recognise
more and more distinctly that the origin of the Christian religion is
fundamentally
to be traced to the absolutely unexampled impression which this one
personality
had made and left upon those who knew Him. So it is that to-day this
revelation
stands before our eyes more definite and for that very reason more
unfathomable
than ever.
This is the first
point to be established. It is in accordance with the whole tendency of
our times, that we can grow enthusiastic only in regard to what is
concrete
and living. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was
different;
the Romantic movement threw its shadows on all sides, and so it had
become
fashionable
181
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
to explain everything “mythically.“
In the year 1835 David Strauss, following the example proffered on all
sides, presented as a key to the gospels “the idea of the myth“! *
Every
one now recognises that this so-called key was nothing more than a new,
mistily vague paraphrase of a still-unsolved problem, and that not an
“idea,“
but only an actually lived existence, only the unique impression of a
personality,
whose like the world had never before known, supplies the “key“ to the
origin of Christianity. The greater the amount of such useless ballast
that was manifest on the one hand in the shape of pseudo-mythical (or
rather
pseudo-historical) legend-making, on the other in the form of
philosophically
dogmatic speculation, the greater is the power of life and resistance
that
must be attributed to the original impelling and creating force. The
most
modern, strictly philological criticism has proved the unexpected
antiquity
of the gospels and the extensive authenticity of the manuscripts which
we possess; we have now succeeded in tracing, almost step for step, the
very earliest records
* Seefirst
edition, i. 72 ff., and the popular edition (ninth) p. 191 ff. Strauss
never had the least notion what a myth is, what mythology means, how it
is produced by the confusion and mingling of popular myths, poetry and
legends. That, however, is another story. Posterity will really not be
able to understand the reception given to such dreary productions as
those
of Strauss: they are learned, but destitute of all deeper insight and
of
any trace of genius. Just as bees and ants require in their communities
whole cohorts of sexless workers, so it seems as if we human beings
could
not get along without the industry and the widespread but ephemeral
influence
of such minds, marked with the stamp of sterility, as flourished in
such
profusion about the middle of the nineteenth century. The progress of
historico-critical
research on the one hand, and on the other the increasing tendency to
direct
attention not to the theological and subordinate, but to that which is
living and decisive, causes one to look upon the mythological
standpoint
of Strauss as so unintelligent that one cannot turn over the leaves of
this honest man's writings without yawning. And yet one must admit that
such men as he and Renan (two concave mirrors which distort all lines,
the one by lengthening, the other by broadening) have accomplished an
important
work — by drawing the attention of thousands to the great miracle of
the
fact of Christ and thus creating a public for profounder thinkers and
wiser
men.
182
THE REVELATION OF CHRIST
of Christianity in a strictly historical
manner. * But all this when considered from the universal human
standpoint
is of much less importance than the one fact, that in consequence of
these
researches the figure of the one Divine Man has been brought into
relief,
so that the unbeliever as well as the believer is bound to recognise it
as the centre and source of Christianity, taking the word in the most
comprehensive
sense possible.
BUDDHA
AND CHRIST
A few pages back I
placed Buddha and Christ in juxtaposition. The kernel of the religious
conceptions of all the more gifted races of mankind (with the two
exceptions
of the small family of the Jews on the one hand and their antipodes the
Brahman Indians on the other) has been for the past few thousand years
not the need for an explanation of the world, nor mythological
Nature-symbolism,
nor meditative transcendentalism, but the experience of great
characters.
The delusion of a “rational religion“ still haunts us; occasionally too
in recent years there has been talk of a “replacing of religion by
something
higher,“ and on the hilltops of certain German districts new
“worshippers
of Wotan“ have offered up sacrifice at the time of the solstice; but
none
of these movements have exercised the slightest influence upon the
world.
For ideas are immortal — I have said so already and shall have to
repeat
it constantly — and in such figures as Buddha and Christ an idea — that
is, a definite conception of human existence — acquires such a living
bodily
form, becomes so thoroughly an experience of life, is placed so clearly
before the eyes of all men, that it can never more disappear from their
conscious-
*
Later
there came a dark period upon which light has still to be thrown.
183 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
ness. Many a man may never have seen
the Crucified One with his eyes; many a man may constantly have passed
this revelation carelessly by; thousands of men, even among ourselves,
lack what one might call the inner sense to perceive Christ at all; on
the other hand, having once seen Jesus Christ — even if it be with
half-veiled
eyes — we cannot forget Him; it does not lie within our power to remove
the object of experience from our minds. We are not Christians because
we were brought up in this or in that Church, because we want to be
Christians;
if we are Christians, it is because we cannot help it, because neither
the chaotic bustle of life nor the delirium of selfishness, nor
artificial
training of thought can dispel the vision of the Man of Sorrow when
once
it has been seen. On the evening before His death, when His Apostles
were
questioning Him as to the significance of one of His actions, He
replied,
“I have given you an example.“ That is the meaning not only of the one
action but of His whole life and death. Even so strict an ecclesiastic
as Martin Luther writes: “The example of our Lord Jesus Christ is at
the
same time a sacrament, it is strong in us, it does not, like the
examples
of the fathers, merely teach, no, it also effects what it teaches, it
gives
life, resurrection and redemption from death.“ The power of Buddha over
the world rests on similar foundations. The true source of all religion
is, I repeat, in the case of the great majority of living people not a
doctrine but a life. It is a different question, of course, how far we,
with our weak capability, can or cannot follow the example; the ideal
is
there, clear, unmistakable, and for centuries it has been moulding with
incomparable power the thoughts and actions of men, even of unbelievers.
I shall return to
this point later in another connection. If I have introduced Buddha
here,
where only the figure of Christ concerns me, I have done so for this
reason,
that nothing shows up a figure so well as comparison.
184 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
The comparison, however, must be an
appropriate one, and I do not know any other than Buddha in the history
of the world whom we could compare with Christ. Both are characterised
by their divine earnestness; they have in common the longing to point
out
to all mankind the way of redemption; they have both incomparably
magnetic
personalities. And yet if one places these two figures side by side, it
can only be to emphasise the contrast and not to draw a parallel
between
them. Christ and Buddha are opposites. What unites them is their
sublimity
of character. From that source have sprung lives of unsurpassed
loveliness,
lives which wielded an influence such as the world had never before
experienced.
Otherwise they differ almost in every point, and the neo-Buddhism which
has been paraded during recent years in certain social circles in
Europe
— in the closest relation, it is said, to Christianity and even going
beyond
it — is but a new proof of the widespread superficiality of thought
among
us. For Buddha's life and thought present a direct contrast to the
thought
and life of Christ: they form what the logician calls the “antithesis,“
what to the natural scientist is the “opposite pole.“
BUDDHA
Buddha represents
the senile decay of a culture which has reached the limit of its
possibilities.
A Prince, highly educated, gifted with a rich fulness of power,
recognises
the vanity of that education and that power. He professes what to the
rest
of the world seems to be the Highest, but with the vision of truth
before
him, this possession melts away to nothing. Indian culture, the outcome
of the meditative contemplation incident to a pastoral life, had thrown
itself with all the weight of its lofty gifts into the development of
the
one attribute
185 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
peculiar to mankind — Reason with the
power of combination: so it came to pass that connection with the
surrounding
world — childlike observation with its practical adaptation to business
— languished, at any rate among the men of higher culture. Everything
was
systematically directed to the development of the power of thought:
every
educated youth knew by heart, word for word, a whole literature charged
with matter so subtle that even to this day few Europeans are capable
of
following it: even geometry, the most abstract of all methods of
representing
the concrete world, was too obvious for the Indians, and so they came
instead
to revel in an arithmetic which goes beyond all possibility of
presentation:
the man who questioned himself as to his aim in life, the man who had
been
gifted by nature with the desire to strive for some highest goal, found
on the one side a religious system in which symbolism had grown to such
mad dimensions that it needed some thirty years to find oneself at home
in it, and on the other side a philosophy leading up to heights so
giddy
that whoso wished to climb the last rungs of this heavenly ladder must
take refuge from the world for ever in the deep silence of the primeval
forest. Clearly here the eye and the heart had lost their rights. Like
the scorching simoom of the desert, the spirit of abstraction had swept
with withering force over all other gifts of this rich human nature.
The
senses indeed still lived — desires of tropical heat: but on the other
side was the negation of the whole world of sense: between these
nothing,
no compromise, only war, war between human perception and human nature,
between thought and being. And so Buddha must hate what he loved;
children,
parents, wife, all that is beautiful and joyous — for what were these
but
veils darkening perception, bonds chaining him to a dream-life of lies
and desire? and what had he to do with all the wisdom of the Brahmans?
Sacrificial ceremonies which no
186 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
human being understood, and which the
priests themselves explained as being purely symbolical and to the
initiated
futile: — beyond this a redemption by perception accessible to scarcely
one man in a hundred thousand. Thus it was that Buddha not only cast
away
from him his kingdom and his knowledge, but tore from his heart all
that
bound him as man to man, all love, all hope: at one blow he destroyed
the
religion of his fathers, drove their gods from the temple of the world,
and rejected as a vain phantom even that most sublime conception of
Indian
metaphysics, that of a one and only God, indescribable, unthinkable,
having
no part in space or time, and therefore inaccessible to thought, and
yet
by thought dimly imagined. There is nothing in life but suffering, this
was Buddha's experience and consequently his teaching. The one object
worth
striving for is “redemption from suffering.“ This redemption is death,
the entering into annihilation. But to every Indian the transmigration
of souls, that is the eternal reincarnation of the same individual, was
believed in as a manifest fact, not even to be called in question.
Death
then, in its ordinary shape, cannot give redemption: it is the gift of
that death only upon which no reincarnation follows: and this redeeming
death can only be attained in one way, namely, that man shall have died
during his life and therefore of his own free will: that is to say,
that
he shall have cut off and annihilated all that ties him to life, all
love,
all hope, all desire, all possession: in short, as we should say with
Schopenhauer,
that he shall have denied the will to live. If man lives in this wise,
if while yet alive he makes himself into a moving corpse, then can the
reaper Death harvest no seed for a reincarnation. A living Death! that
is the essence of Buddhism! We may describe Buddhism as the lived
suicide.
It is suicide in its highest potentiality: for Buddha lives solely and
only to die, to be
187
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
dead definitely and beyond recall, to
enter into Nirvana — extinction. *
CHRIST
What greater
contrast
could there be to this figure than that of Christ, whose death
signifies
entrance into eternal life? Christ perceives divine Providence in the
whole
world; not a sparrow falls to the ground, not a hair on the head of a
man
can be injured, without the permission of the Heavenly Father. And far
from hating this earthly existence, which is lived by the will and
under
the eye of God, Christ praises it as the entry into eternity, as the
narrow
gate through which we pass into the Kingdom of God. And this Kingdom of
God, what is it? A Nirvana? a Dream-Paradise? a future reward for deeds
done here below? Christ gives the answer in one word, which has
undoubtedly
been authentically handed down to us, for it had never been uttered
before,
and no one of His disciples evidently understood it, much less invented
it; indeed, this eagle thought flashed so far in front of the slow
unfolding
of human knowledge that even to the present day few have seen the
meaning
of it — as I said before, Christianity is still in its infancy —
Christ's
answer was, “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither
shall
they say, Lo here or lo there. For behold, the Kingdom of God is within
you.“ This is what Christ himself calls the “mystery“; it cannot be
expressed
in words, it cannot be defined; and ever and ever again the Saviour
endeavours
to bring home
*
I
have translated das nichts by extinction, which is the
rendering
of Nirvana by Rhys Davids. He says: “What then is Nirvana, which means
simply going out, extinction“; and then he goes on to say that
it
ought to be translated “Holiness.“ But that will not do here, nor is it
altogether incapable of being argued. Extinction gives Chamberlain's
meaning
better than “nothingness,“ which is not quite satisfactory. Perhaps
“Holy
Extinction“ comes near to the Buddhist conception. The idea of Rhys
Davids
would thus not be lost. (Translator's Note.)
188
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
His great message of salvation by means
of parables: the Kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed in the
field, “the least of all seeds,“ but if it is tended by the husbandman,
it grows to a tree, “so that the birds of the air come and lodge under
its branches“; the Kingdom of God is like the leaven among the flour,
if
the housewife take but a little, it leavens the whole lump; but the
following
figure speaks most plainly: “the Kingdom of God is like unto a treasure
hid in a field.“ * That the field means the world, Christ expressly
says
(see Matthew xiii. 38); in this world, that is, in this life,
the
treasure lies concealed; the Kingdom of God is buried within us! That
is
the “mystery of the Kingdom of God,“ as Christ says; at the same time
it
is the secret of His own life, the secret of His personality. An
estrangement
from life, as in the case of Buddha, is not to be found in Christ,
there
is, however, a “conversion“ of the direction of life, if I may so call
it, as, for example, when Christ says to His disciples, “Verily I say
unto
you, Except ye be converted, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of
God.“
† At a later period this so easily grasped “conversion“ received —
perhaps
from a strange hand — the more mystical expression, “Except a man be
born
again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.“ The words do not matter, what
is important is the conception underlying them, and this conception
stands
out luminously clear, because it gives form to the whole life of
*
The
expression Uranos or “Kingdom of Heaven“ occurs only in Matthew
and is certainly not the right translation into Greek of any expression
used by Christ. The other evangelists always say “Kingdom of God.“ (Cf.
my collection of the Worte Christi, large edition, p. 260, small
edition, p. 279, and for more learned and definite explanation see
H. H. Wendt's Lehre Jesu, 1886, pp. 48 and 58.)
† The
emphasis clearly does not lie on the additional clause “and become as
little
children“; this is rather an explanation of the conversion. What is it
that distinguishes children? Unalloyed joy in life and the unspoilt
power
of throwing a glamour over it by their temperaments.
189 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
Christ. Here we do not find a doctrine
like that of Buddha with a logical arithmetical development; nor is
there,
as has so frequently been asserted by the superficial, any organic
connection
with Jewish wisdom: read the words of Jesus Sirach, who is most
frequently
compared with Christ, and ask yourselves whether that is “Spirit of the
same Spirit“? Sirach speaks like a Jewish Marcus Aurelius and even his
finest sayings, such as “Seek wisdom until death, and God will fight
for
you,“ or, “The heart of the fool lies upon his tongue, but the tongue
of
the wise man dwells within his heart,“ are as a sound from another
world
when put beside the sayings of Christ: “Blessed are the meek, for they
shall inherit the earth; blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall
see God; take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly
of heart, and you will find rest unto your souls, for my yoke is easy
and
my burden is light.“ No one had ever spoken like that before, and no
one
has spoken so since. These words of Christ have, however, as we can
see,
never the character of a doctrine, but just as the tone of a voice
supplements
by a mysterious inexpressible something — which is the most personal
element
in the personality — what we already know about a man from his features
and his actions, so do we seem to hear in them his voice: what he
exactly
said we do not know, but an unmistakable, unforgettable tone strikes
our
ear and from our ear enters our heart. And then we open our eyes and
see
this figure, this life. Down through the ages we hear the words, “Learn
of me,“ and we understand what they mean: to be as Christ was, to live
as Christ lived, to die as Christ died, that is the Kingdom of God,
that
is eternal life.
In the nineteenth
century, the ideas of pessimism and negation of the will, which have
become
so common, have been frequently applied to Christ; but though they fit
Buddha and certain features of the Christian churches
190 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
and their dogmas, Christ's life is their
denial. If the Kingdom of God dwells in us, if it is embraced in this
life
like a hidden treasure, what becomes of the sense of pessimism? * How
can
man be a wretch born only for grief, if the divinity lies in his
breast?
How can this world be the worst of all possible worlds (see
Schopenhauer:
Die
Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. ii. chap. xlvi.) if it
contains
Heaven? For Christ these were all delusive fallacies; woe to you, He
said
of the learned, “who shut up the Kingdom of God against men; for ye
neither
go in yourselves neither suffer ye them that would enter to go in,“ and
He praised God that He had “revealed to babes and sucklings what He had
hidden from the wise and prudent“; Christ, as one of the greatest men
of
the nineteenth century has said, was “not wise, but divine“; † that is
a mighty difference; and because He was divine, Christ did not turn
away
from life, but to life. This is eloquently vouched for by the
impression
which Christ made and left upon those who knew Him; they call Him the
tree
of life, the bread of life, the water of life, the light of life, the
light
of the world, a light from above sent to lighten those that sit in
darkness
and in the shadow of death; Christ is for them the rock, the foundation
upon which we are to build our lives, &c, &c. Everything is
positive,
constructive, affirmative. Whether Christ really brought the dead to
life
may be doubted by any one who will; but such a one must estimate all
the
more highly the life-giving impression which radiated from this figure,
for wherever Christ went people believed that they saw the dead come to
life and the sick rise healed from their beds. Everywhere He sought out
the suffering, the poor, those laden with sorrow,
*
I
need scarcely say that I take the word pessimism, which is capable of
such
a variety of interpretations, in the popular, superficial sense of a
moral
frame of mind, not a philosophical cognition.
†
Diderot
also, to whom one cannot attribute orthodox faith, says in the Encyclopédie:
“Christ ne fut point un philosophe, ce fut un Dieu.“
191 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
and bidding them “weep not,“ consoled
them with words of life. From inner Asia came the idea of flight from
the
world to the cloister. Buddhism had not in truth invented it, but gave
it its greatest impulse. Christianity, too, imitated it later, closely
following the Egyptian example. This idea had already advanced to the
very
neighbourhood of the Galilean; yet where does one find Christ preaching
monastic doctrines of seclusion from the world? Many founders of
religion
have imposed penance in respect of food upon themselves and their
disciples;
not so Christ; He emphasises particularly that He had not fasted like
John,
but had so lived that men called Him a “glutton and a winebibber.“ All
the following expressions which we know so well from the Bible — that
the
thoughts of men are vain, that the life of man is vanity, he passes
away
like a shadow, the work of man is vain, all is vanity — come from the
Old,
not from the New Testament. Indeed such words as those, for example, of
the preacher Solomon, “One generation passeth away and another
generation
cometh, but the earth abideth for ever,“ are derived from a view of
life
which is directly contrary to that of Christ; because according to the
latter Heaven and earth pass away, while the human breast conceals in
its
depths the only thing that is everlasting. It is true that Jesus Christ
offers the example of an absolute renunciation of much that makes up
the
life of the greater proportion of mankind; but it is done for the sake
of life; this renunciation is the “conversion“ which, we are told,
leads
to the Kingdom of Heaven, and it is not outward but purely inward. What
Buddha teaches is, so to speak, a physical process, it is the actual
extinction
of the physical and intellectual being; whoever wishes to be redeemed
must
take the three vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. In the case of
Christ we find nothing similar: He attends marriages, He declares
wedlock
to be a holy
192 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
ordinance of God, and even the errors
of the flesh he judges so leniently that He Himself has not a word of
condemnation
for the adulteress; He indeed speaks of wealth as rendering the
“conversion“
of the will more difficult — as, for example, when He says that it is
more
difficult for a rich man to enter into that kingdom of God which lies
within
us than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but He
immediately
adds — and this is the characteristic and decisive part — “the things
which
are impossible with men are possible with God.“ This is again one of
those
passages which cannot be invention, for nowhere in the whole world do
we
find anything like it. There had been enough and to spare of diatribes
against wealth before (one need only read the Jewish Prophets), they
were
repeated later (read, for instance, the Epistle of James, chap.
ii.); according to Christ, however, wealth is a mere accessory, the
possession
of which may or may not be a hindrance, for the one thing which
concerns
Him is the inner and spiritual conversion. And this it was that, in
dealing
with this very case, by far the greatest of the Apostles amplified so
beautifully;
for while Christ had advised the rich young man, “Sell all that thou
hast
and give it to the poor,“ Paul completes the saying by the remark, “and
though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and have not charity it
profiteth
me nothing.“ The Buddhist who is steering for death may be satisfied
with
poverty, chastity, and obedience; he who chooses life has other things
to think of.
And here it is
necessary
to call attention to one more point, in which the living essence of
Christ's
personality and example manifests itself freshly and convincingly; I
refer
to His combativeness. The sayings of Christ on humility and patience,
His
exhortation that we should love our enemies and bless those that curse
us, find almost
193
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
exact parallels in the sayings of
Buddha;
but they spring from quite a different motive. For Buddha every
injustice
endured is an extinction, for Christ it is a means of advancing the new
view of life: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness'
sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of God“ (that kingdom which lies hidden
like a treasure in the field of life). But if we pass to the inner
being,
if that one fundamental question of the direction of will is brought
up,
then we hear words of quite a different kind: “Suppose ye that I am
come
to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay, but rather division! For from
henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, two against three,
and three against two.... For I am come to stir up the son against his
father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law
against
the mother-in-law; and the man's enemies shall be they of his own
household.“
Not peace but the sword: that is a voice to which we cannot shut our
ears,
if we wish to understand the revelation of Christ. The life of Jesus
Christ
is an open declaration of war, not against the forms of civilisation,
culture
and religion, which He found around Him — He observes the Jewish law of
religion and teaches us to give to Caesar what is Caesar's — but
certainly
against the inner spirit of mankind, against the motives which underlie
their actions, against the goal which they set for themselves in the
future
life and in the present. The coming of Christ signifies, from the point
of view of the world's history, the coming of a new human species.
Linnaeus
distinguished as many human species as there are colours of skin; but a
new colouring of the will goes really deeper into the organism than a
difference
in the pigment of the epidermis! And the Lord of this new human
species,
the “new Adam,“ as the Scripture so well describes Him, will have no
compromise;
He puts the choice: God or mammon. Whoever chooses
194 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
conversion, whoever obeys the warning
of Christ, “Follow me!“ must also when necessary leave father and
mother,
wife and child; but he does not leave them, like the disciples of
Buddha,
to find death, but to find life. Here is no room for pity: whom we have
lost we have lost, and with the ancient hardness of the heroic spirit
not
a tear is shed over those who are gone: “Let the dead bury their dead.“
Not every one is capable of understanding the word of Christ, He in
fact
tells us, “Many are called but few are chosen,“ and here again Paul has
given drastic expression to this fact: “The preaching of the Cross is
to
them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the
power
of God.“ So far as outward forms go Christ has no preferences, but
where
the direction of the will is concerned, whether it is directed to the
Eternal
or the Temporal, whether it advances or hinders the unfolding of that
immeasurable
power of life in the heart of man, whether it aims at the quickening of
that “Kingdom of God within us“ or, on the other hand, scatters for
ever
the one treasure of “them that are chosen“ — there is with Him no
question
of tolerance and never can be. In this very connection much has been
done
since the eighteenth century to rob the sublime countenance of the Son
of Man of all its mighty features. We have had represented to us as
Christianity
a strange delusive picture of boundless tolerance, of universally
gentle
passivity, a kind of milk-and-water religion; in the last few years we
have actually witnessed “interconfessional religious congresses,“ where
all the priests of the world shake hands as brothers, and many
Christians
welcome this as particularly “Christlike.“ It may be ecclesiastical, it
may be right and good, but Christ would never have sent an apostle to
such
a congress. Either the word of the Cross is “foolishness“ or it is “a
divine
power“; between the two Christ himself has torn open the yawning
195 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
gulf of “division,“ and, to prevent
any possibility of its being bridged, has drawn the flaming “sword.“
Whoever
understands the revelation of Christ cannot be surprised. The tolerance
of Christ is that of a spirit which soars high as Heaven above all
forms
that divide the world; a combination of these forms could not have the
slightest importance for Him — that would mean only the rise of a new
form;
He, on the other hand, considers only the “spirit and the truth.“ And
when
Christ teaches, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek turn to
him the other also, and if any man will take away thy coat let him have
thy cloak also“ — a doctrine to which His example on the Cross gave
everlasting
significance — who does not understand that this is closely related to
what follows, “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you,“ and
that
here that inner “conversion“ is expressed, not passively, but in the
highest
possible form of living action? If I offer the impudent striker my left
cheek, I do not do so for his sake; if I love my enemy and show him
kindness,
it is not for his sake; after the conversion of the will it is simply
inevitable
and therefore I do it. The old law, an eye for an eye, hatred for
hatred,
is just as natural a reflex action as that which causes the legs of a
dead
frog to kick when the nerves are stimulated. In sooth it must be a “new
Adam“ who has gained such complete mastery over his “old Adam“ that he
does not obey this impulse. However, it is not merely self-control —
for
if Buddha forms the one opposite pole to Christ, the Stoic forms the
other;
but that conversion of the will, that entry into the hidden kingdom of
God, that being born again, which makes up the sum of Christ's example,
demands a complete conversion of the feelings. This, in fact, is the
new
thing. Till Christ blood-vengeance was the sacred law of all men of the
most different races; but from the Cross there
196 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
came the cry, “Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do!“ Whoever takes the divine voice of pity
for weak humanitarianism has not understood a single feature of the
advent
of Christ. The voice which here speaks comes from that Kingdom of God
which
is within us; pain and death have lost their power over it; they affect
him who is born again just as little as the stroke on the cheek or the
theft of the coat; everything that drives, constrains and compels the
human
half-ape — selfishness, superstition, prejudice, envy, hatred — breaks
on such a will as this like sea-foam on a granite cliff; in face of
death
Christ scarcely notices His own pain and tribulation, He sees only that
men are crucifying what is divine in them, and they are treading under
foot the seed of the Kingdom of God and scattering the “treasure in the
field,“ and thus it is that, full of pity, He calls out, “They know not
what they do!“ Search the history of the world and you will not find a
word to equal this for sublime pride. Here speaks a discernment that
has
penetrated farther than the Indian mind, here speaks at the same time
the
strongest will, the surest consciousness of self.
Just as we children
of a modern age have discovered in the whole world a power which before
only from time to time flashed forth in fleeting clouds as the
lightning,
a power hidden, invisible, perceived by no sense, to be explained by no
hypothesis, but all-present and almighty, and in the same way as we are
driven to trace the complete transformation of our outward conditions
of
life to this power — so Christ pointed to a hidden power in the
unfathomed
and unfathomable depths of the human heart, a power capable of
completely
transforming man, capable of making a sorrow-trodden wretch mighty and
blessed. The lightning had hitherto been only a destroyer; the power
which
it taught us to discover is
197 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
now the servant of peaceful work and
comfort; in like manner the human will, from the beginning of time the
seed of all the misfortune and misery that descended upon the human
race,
was henceforth to minister to the new birth of this race, to the rise
of
a new human species. Hence, as I have pointed out in the introduction
to this book, the incomparable significance of the life of Christ for
the
world's history. No political revolution can compare with it.
From the point of
view of universal history we have every reason to put the achievement
of
Christ on a parallel with the achievements of the Hellenes. In the
first
chapter I have described in how far Homer, Democritus, Plato, &c.
&c.
are to be considered as real “creators,“ and I added, “then and then
only
is a new creature born, then only does the macrocosm contain a
microcosm.
The only thing that deserves to be called culture is the daughter of
such
creative freedom.“ * What Greece did for the intellect, Christ did for
the moral life: man had not a moral culture till He gave it. I should
rather
say, the possibility of a moral culture; for the motive power of
culture
is that inner, creative process, the voluntary masterful conversion of
the will, and this very motive power was with rare exceptions quite
overlooked;
Christianity became an essentially historical religion, and at the
altars
of its churches all the superstitions of antiquity and of Judaism found
a consecrated place of refuge. Yet we have in the revelation of Christ
the one foundation of all moral culture, and the moral culture of our
nations
is greater or smaller in proportion to the extent to which his
personality
is able more or less clearly to prevail.
It is in this
connection
that we can with truth assert that the appearance of Christ upon earth
has divided
* See
p.
25.
198 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
mankind into two classes. It created
for the first time true nobility, and indeed true nobility of birth,
for
only he who is chosen can be a Christian. But at the same time it sowed
in the hearts of the chosen the seed of new and bitter suffering: it
separated
them from father and mother, it made them lonely wanderers among men
who
did not understand them, it stamped them as martyrs. And who after all
is really master? Who has entirely conquered his slavish instincts?
Discord
from now onward rent the individual soul. And now that the individual,
who hitherto in the tumultuous struggle of life had scarcely attained
to
a consciousness of his “Ego,“ was awakened to an unexpectedly high
conception
of his dignity, inner significance and power, how often was his heart
bound
to fail him in the consciousness of his weakness and unworthiness? Now
and now only did life become truly tragical. This was brought about by
man's own free act in rising against his animal nature. “From a perfect
pupil of nature man became an imperfect moral being, from a good
instrument
a bad artist,“ says Schiller. But man will no longer be an instrument;
and as Homer had created gods such as he wished them, so now man
rebelled
against the moral tyranny of nature and created a sublime morality such
as he desired; he would no longer obey blind impulses, beautifully
constrained
and restricted as they might be by legal paragraphs; his own law of
morals
would henceforth be his only standard. In Christ man awakens to
consciousness
of his moral calling, but thereby at the same time to the necessity of
an inner struggle that is reckoned in tens of centuries. Under the
heading
Philosophy
in the ninth chapter (vol. ii.), I shall show that after an
anti-Christian
reaction lasting for many centuries we have with Kant returned again to
exactly the same path. The humanitarian Deists of the eighteenth
century
who turned
199 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
away from Christ thought the proper
course was a “return to nature“: on the contrary, it is emancipation
from
nature, without which we can achieve nothing, but which we are
determined
to make subject to ourselves. In Art and Philosophy man becomes
conscious
of himself, in contrast to nature, as an intellectual being; in
marriage
and law he becomes conscious of himself as a social being, in Christ as
a moral being. He throws down the gauntlet for a fight in which there
is
no place for humility; whoever will follow Christ requires above all
courage,
courage in its purest form, that inner courage, which is steeled and
hardened
anew every day, which proves itself not merely in the intoxicating
clash
of battle, but in bearing and enduring, and in the silent, soundless
struggle
of every hour in the individual breast. The example is given. For in
the
advent of Christ we find the grandest example of heroism. Moral heroism
is in Him so sublime that the much-extolled physical courage of heroes
seems as nothing; certain it is that only heroic souls — only “masters“
— can in the true sense of the word be Christians. And when Christ
says,
“I am meek,“ we well understand that this is the meekness of the hero
sure
of victory; and when He says, “I am lowly of heart,“ we know that this
is not the humility of the slave, but the humility of the master, who
from
the fulness of his power bows down to the weak.
On one occasion when
Jesus was addressed not simply as Lord or Master, but as “good master,“
He rejected the appellation: “Why callest thou Me good: there is none
good.“
This should make us think, and should convince us that it is a mistaken
view of Christ which forces His heavenly goodness, His humility and
long-suffering,
into the foreground of His character; they do not form its basis, but
are
like fragrant flowers on a strong stem. What was the basis of the
world-power
of
200 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
Buddha? Not his doctrine, but his
example,
his heroic achievement; it was the revelation of an almost supernatural
will-power which held and still holds millions in its spell. But in
Christ
a still higher will revealed itself; He did not need to flee from the
world;
He did not avoid the beautiful, He praised the use of the costly —
which
His disciples called “prodigality“; He did not retire to the
wilderness,
from the wilderness He came and entered into life, a victor, who had a
message of good news to proclaim — not death, but redemption! I said
that
Buddha represented the senile decay of a culture which had strayed into
wrong paths: Christ, on the other hand, represents the morning of a new
day; He won from the old human nature a new youth, and thus became the
God of the young, vigorous Indo-Europeans, and under the sign of His
cross
there slowly arose upon the ruins of the old world a new culture — a
culture
at which we have still to toil long and laboriously until some day in
the
distant future it may deserve the appellation “Christ-like.“
THE
GALILEANS
Were I to follow
my
own inclination, I should close this chapter here. But it is necessary
in the interest of many points to be discussed later to consider the
personality
of Christ not only in its pure isolated individuality but also in its
relation
to its surroundings. Otherwise there are many important phenomena in
the
past and the present which remain incomprehensible. It is by no means a
matter of indifference whether by close analysis we have formed exact
ideas
as to what in this figure is Jewish and what is not. On this point
there
has been from the beginning of the Christian era to the present day and
from the lowest depths of the intellectual world to its greatest
heights,
enormous confusion. Not
201 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
merely was so sublime a figure not easy
for any one to comprehend and to contemplate in its organic relations
to
the contemporary world, but everything concurred to dim and falsify its
true features: Jewish religious idiosyncrasy, Syrian mysticism,
Egyptian
asceticism, Hellenic metaphysics, soon too Roman traditions of State
and
Pontifex, as also the superstitions of the barbarians; every form of
misunderstanding
and stupidity had a share in the work. In the nineteenth century many
have
devoted themselves to the unravelling of this tangle, but, so far as I
know, no one has succeeded in separating from the mass of facts the few
essential points and putting them clearly before the eyes of all. In
fact
even honest learning does not protect us against prejudice and
partiality.
We shall here try, unfortunately indeed without the specialist's
knowledge,
but also without prejudice, to find out how far Christ belonged to His
surroundings and employed their forms for viewing things, how far He
differed
from them and rose high as the heavens above them; only in this way can
we free His personality from all accidental circumstances and show its
full autonomous dignity.
Let us therefore
first ask ourselves, was Christ a Jew by race?
The question seems
at the first glance somewhat childish. In the presence of such a
personality
peculiarities of race shrink into nothingness. An Isaiah, however much
he may tower above his contemporaries, remains a thorough Jew; not a
word
did he utter that did not spring from the history and spirit of his
people;
even where he mercilessly exposes and condemns what is
characteristically
Jewish, he proves himself — especially in this — the Jew; in the case
of
Christ there is not a trace of this. Take again Homer! He awakens the
Hellenic
people for the first time to consciousness of itself; to be able to do
that, he had to harbour in his
202 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
own bosom the quintessence of all
Hellenism.
But where is the people, which, awakened by Christ to life, has gained
for itself the precious right — of calling Christ its own? Certainly
not
in Judea! — To the believer Jesus is the Son of God, not of a human
being;
for the unbeliever it will be difficult to find a formula to
characterise
so briefly and yet so expressively the undeniable fact of this
incomparable
and inexplicable personality. After all there are phenomena which
cannot
be placed in the complex of our intellectual conceptions without a
symbol.
So much in regard to the question of principle, and in order to remove
from myself all suspicion of being taken in tow by that superficial
“historical“
school, which undertakes to explain the inexplicable. It is another
matter
to seek to gain all possible information regarding the historical
surroundings
of a personality for the simple purpose of obtaining a clearer and
better
view of it. If we do attempt this, the answer to the question, Was
Christ
a Jew? is by no means a simple one. In religion and education He was so
undoubtedly; in race — in the narrower and real sense of the word “Jew“
— most probably not.
The name Galilee
(from Gelil haggoyim) means “district of the heathen.“ It seems
that this part of the country, so far removed from the intellectual
centre,
had never kept itself altogether pure, even in the earliest times when
Israel was still strong and united, and it had served as home for the
tribes
Naphtali and Zebulon. Of the tribe Naphtali we are told that it was
from
the first “of very mixed origin,“ and while the non-Israelitic
aborigines
continued to dwell in the whole of Palestine as before, this was the
case
“nowhere in so great a degree as in the northern districts.“ * There
was,
however,
*
Wellhausen:
Israelitische
und jüdische Geschichte, 3rd ed., 1897, pp. 16 and 74. Cf.
too, Judges, i. 30 and 33, and further on in this book, chap.
v.
203 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
another additional circumstance. While
the rest of Palestine remained, owing to its geographical position,
isolated
as it were from the world, there was, even at the time when the
Israelites
took possession of the land, a road leading from the lake of
Gennesareth
to Damascus, and from that point Tyre and Sidon were more accessible
than
Jerusalem. Thus we find that Solomon ceded a considerable part of this
district of the heathen (as it was already called, 1 Kings, ix.
11), with twenty cities to the King of Tyre in payment of his
deliveries
of cedar- and pine-trees, as well as for the one hundred and twenty
hundredweights
of gold which the latter had contributed towards the building of the
temple;
so little interest had the King of Judea in this land, half inhabited
as
it was by heathens. The Tyrian King Hiram must in fact have found it
sparsely
populated, as he profited by the opportunity to settle various foreign
tribes in Galilee. * Then came, as every one knows, the division into
two
kingdoms, and since that time, that is, since about a thousand years
before
Christ (!) only now and again, and then but for a short time, had there
been any comparatively close political connection between Galilee and
Judea,
and it is only this, not community of religious faith, that furthers a
fusion of races. In Christ's time, too, Galilee was politically quite
separate
from Judea, so that it stood to the latter in the relation “of a
foreign
country“ † In the meantime, however, something had happened, which must
have destroyed almost completely
*
Graetz:
Volkstümliche
Geschichte der Juden, i. 88.
† Ibid.
i. 567. Galilee and Perea had together a tetrarch who ruled
independently,
while Judea, Samaria and Idumea were under a Roman procurator. Graetz
adds
at this point, “Owing to the enmity of the Samaritans whose land lay
like
a wedge between Judea and Galilee and round [sic] both, there
was
all the less intercourse between the two separated districts.“ I have
here
for simplicity refrained from mentioning the further fact that we have
no right to identify the genuine “Israelites“ of the North with the
real
“Jews“ of the South; but cf. chap.
v.
204 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
for all time the Israelitish character
of this northern district: seven hundred and twenty years before Christ
(that is about one hundred and fifty years before the Babylonian
captivity
of the Jews) the northern kingdom of Israel was laid waste by the
Assyrians,
and its population — it is said to a man, at all events to a large
extent
— deported into different and distant parts of the Empire, where it
soon
fused with the rest of the inhabitants and in consequence completely
disappeared.
* At the same time strange races from remote districts were transported
to Palestine to settle there. The authorities indeed suppose (without
being
able to vouch for it) that a considerable portion of the former mixed
Israelitish
population had remained in the land; at any rate this remnant did not
keep
apart from the strangers, but became merged in the medley of races. †
The
fate of these districts was consequently quite different from that of
Judea.
For when the Judeans at a later time were also led into captivity,
their
land remained so to speak empty, inhabited only by a few peasants who
moreover
belonged to the country, so that when they returned from the Babylonian
captivity, during which they had kept their race pure, they were able
without
difficulty to maintain that purity. Galilee, on the other hand, and
*
So
completely disappeared that many theologians, who had leisure, puzzled
their brains even in the nineteenth century to discover what had become
of the Israelites, as they could not believe that five-sixths of the
people
to whom Jehovah had promised the whole world should have simply
vanished
off the face of the earth. An ingenious brain actually arrived at the
conclusion
that the ten tribes believed to be lost were the English of to-day! He
was not at a loss for the moral of this discovery either: in this way
the
British possess by right five-sixths of the whole earth; the remaining
sixth the Jews.
Cf. H. L.: Lost Israel, where are they to be
found? (Edinburgh, 6th ed., 1877). In this pamphlet another work is
named, Wilson,
Our Israelitish Origin. There are, according to these
authorities, honest Anglo-Saxons who have traced their genealogy back
to
Moses!
†
Robertson
Smith: The Prophets of Israel (1895), p. 153, informs us to
what
an extent “the distinguishing character of the Israelitish nation was
lost.“
205
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
the neighbouring districts had, as
already
mentioned, been systematically colonised by the Assyrians, and, as it
appears
from the Biblical account, from very different parts of that gigantic
empire,
among others from the northerly mountainous Syria. Then in the
centuries
before the birth of Christ many Phoenicians and Greeks had also
migrated
thither. * This last fact would lead one to assume that purely Aryan
blood
also was transplanted thither; at any rate it is certain that a
promiscuous
mixture of the most different races took place, and that the foreigners
in all probability settled in largest numbers in the more accessible
and
at the same time more fertile Galilee. The Old Testament itself tells
with
artless simplicity how these strangers originally came to be acquainted
with the worship of Jehovah (2 Kings, xvii. 24 ff.): in the
depopulated
land beasts of prey multiplied; this plague was held to be the
vengeance
of the neglected “God of the Land“ (verse 26); but there was no one who
knew how the latter should be worshipped; and so the colonists sent to
the King of Assyria and begged for an Israelitish priest from the
captivity,
and he came and “taught them the manner of the God of the land.“ In
this
way the inhabitants of Northern Palestine, from Samaria downward,
became
Jews in faith, even those of them who had not a drop of Israelitish
blood
in their veins. In later times many genuine Jews may certainly have
settled
there; but probably only as strangers in the larger cities, for one of
the most admirable characteristics of the Jews — particularly since
their
return from captivity where the clearly circumscribed term “Jew“ first
appears as the designation of a religion (see Zechariah, viii.
23)
— was their care to keep the race pure; marriage between Jew and
Galilean
was unthinkable. However,
*
Albert
Réville: Jésus de Nazareth, i. 416. One should
remember
also that Alexander the Great had peopled neighbouring Samaria with
Macedonians
after the revolt of the year 311.
206 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
even these Jewish elements in the midst
of the strange population were completely removed from Galilee not very
long before the birth of Christ! It was Simon Tharsi, one of the
Maccabeans,
who, after a successful campaign in Galilee against the Syrians,
“gathered
together the Jews who lived there and bade them emgrate and settle bag
and baggage in Judea.“ * Moreover the prejudice against Galilee
remained
so strong among the Jews that, when Herod Antipas during Christ's youth
had built the city of Tiberias and tried to get Jews to settle there,
neither
promises nor threats were of any avail. † There is, accordingly, as we
see, not the slightest foundation for the supposition that Christ's
parents
were of Jewish descent.
In the further course
of historical development an event took place which has many parallels
in history: among the inhabitants of the more southerly Samaria (which
directly bordered on Judea) — a people which beyond doubt was much more
closely related to the real Jews by blood and intercourse than the
Galileans
were — the North-Israelitish tradition of hatred and jealousy of the
Jews
was kept up; the Samaritans did not recognise the ecclesiastical
supremacy
of Jerusalem and were therefore, as being “heterodox,“ so hated by the
Jews that no kind of intercourse with them was permitted: not even a
piece
of bread could the faithful take from their hand; that was considered
as
great a sin as eating pork. ‡ The Galileans, on the other hand, who
were
to the Jews simply “foreigners,“ and as such of course despised and
excluded
from many religious observances, were yet strictly orthodox and
frequently
fanatical
*
Graetz,
as above, i. 400. See also 1 Maccabees, v. 23.
†
Graetz,
as above, i. 568. Compare Josephus, Book XVIII., chap. iii.
‡
Quoted
by Renan from the Mishna: s. Vie de Jésus, 23rd edition,
p. 242.
207 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
“Jews.“ To see in that a proof of
descent
is absurd. It is just the same as if one were to identify the genuinely
Slav population of Bosnia or the purest Indo-Aryans of Afghanistan
ethnologically
with the “Turks,“ because they are strict Mohammedans, much more pious
and fanatical than the genuine Osmans. The term Jew is applicable to a
definite, remarkably pure race, and only in a secondary and very
inexact
sense to the members of a religious community. It is moreover far from
correct to identify the term “Jew“ with the term “Semite,“ as has so
frequently
been done of late years; the national character of the Arabs, for
instance,
is quite different from that of the Jews. I return to this point in the
fifth
chapter; in the meantime, I must point out that the national
character
of the Galileans was essentially different from that of the Jews. Open
any history of the Jews that you will, that of Ewald or Graetz or
Renan,
everywhere you will find that in character the Galileans present a
direct
contrast to the rest of the inhabitants of Palestine; they are
described
as hot-heads, energetic idealists, men of action. In the long struggles
with Rome, before and after the time of Christ, the Galileans are
mostly
the ringleaders — an element which death alone could overcome. While
the
great colonies of genuine Jews in Rome and Alexandria lived on
excellent
terms with the heathen Empire, where they enjoyed great prosperity as
interpreters
of dreams, * dealers in second-hand goods, pedlars, money-lenders,
actors,
law-agents, merchants, teachers, &c., in distant Galilee Hezekiah
ventured,
even in the lifetime of Caesar, to raise the standard of religious
revolt.
He was followed by the famous Judas the Galilean with the motto, “God
alone
is master, death does not matter, freedom is all
*
Juvenal
says:
- Aere minuto
- Qualiacunque
voles Judaei
somnia vendunt...
208 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
in all!“ * In Galilee was formed the
Sicarian party (i.e., men of the knife), not unlike the Indian
Thugs
of to-day; their most influential leader, the Galilean Menaham, in
Nero's
time destroyed the Roman garrison of Jerusalem, and as a reward the
Jews
themselves executed him, under the pretext that he wished to proclaim
himself
the Messias; the sons of Judas also were crucified as politically
dangerous
revolutionaries (and that too by a Jewish procurator); John of Giscala,
a city on the extreme northern boundary of Galilee, headed the
desperate
defence of Jerusalem against Titus — and the series of Galilean heroes
was completed by Eleazar, who years after the destruction of Jerusalem
maintained with a small troop a fortified position in the mountains,
where
he and his followers, when the last hope was lost, killed first their
wives
and children and then themselves. † In these things, as every one will
probably admit, a peculiar, distinct national character reveals itself.
There are many reports too of the special beauty of the women of
Galilee;
moreover, the Christians of the first centuries speak of their great
kindness,
and contrast their friendliness to those of a different faith with the
haughty contemptuous treatment they met with at the hands of genuine
Jewesses.
Their peculiar national character unmistakably betrayed itself in
another
way, viz., their language. In Judea and the neighbouring lands Aramaic
was spoken at the time of Christ; Hebrew was already a dead language,
preserved
only in the sacred writings. We are now informed that the Galileans
spoke
so peculiar and strange a dialect of Aramaic that one recognised them
from
the first word; “thy language betrayeth thee“ the servants of the High
Priest cry to
*
Mommsen,
Römische
Geschichte, v. 515.
†
Later,
too, the inhabitants of Galilee were a peculiar race distinguished for
strength and courage, as is proved by their taking part in the campaign
under the Persian Scharbarza and in the taking of Jerusalem in the year
614.
209 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
Peter. * The acquisition of Hebrew is
said to have been utterly impossible to them, the gutturals especially
presenting insuperable difficulties, so that they could not be allowed,
for example, to pray before the people, as their “wretched accent made
every one laugh.“ † This fact points to a physical difference in the
form
of the larynx and would alone lead us to suppose that a strong
admixture
of non-Semitic blood had taken place; for the profusion of gutturals
and
facility in using them are features common to all Semites. ‡
I have thought it
necessary to enter with some fulness into this question — was Christ a
Jew in race? — because in not a single work have I found the facts that
pertain to it clearly put together. Even in an objectively scientific
work
like that of Albert Réville, § which is influenced by no
theological
motives — Réville is the well-known Professor of Comparative
Religions
at the Collège de France — the word Jew is sometimes used to
signify
the Jewish race, sometimes the Jewish religion.
*
As
a matter of fact sufficient evidence of the difference between the
Galileans
and the real Jews could be gathered from the gospels. In John
especially
“the Jews“ are always spoken of as something alien, and the Jews on
their
part exclaim, “Out of Galilee ariseth no prophet“ (7, 52).
† Cf.,
for example, Graetz, as above, i. 575. With regard to the peculiarity
of
the speech of the Galileans and their incapacity to pronounce the
Semitic
gutturals properly, see Renan: Langues sémitiques,
5th ed., p. 230.
‡ See,
for example, the comparative table in Max Müller: Science of
Language,
9th
ed., p. 169, and in each separate volume of the Sacred Books of the
East. The Sanscrit language has only six genuine “gutturals,“ the
Hebrew
ten; most striking, however, is the difference in the guttural aspirate
h, for which the Indo-Teutonic languages from time immemorial have
known
only one sound, the Semitic, on the other hand, five different sounds.
Again, we find in Sanscrit seven different lingual consonants, in
Hebrew
only two. How exceedingly difficult it is for such inherited linguistic
marks of race to disappear altogether is well known to us all through
the
example of the Jews living among us; a perfect mastery of the lingual
sounds
is just as impossible for them as the mastery of the gutturals for us.
§
Jésus
de Nazareth, études critiques sur les antécédents
de l'histoire évangélique et la vie de Jésus,
vol. ii. 1897.
210 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
We read, for example (i. 416), “Galilee
was chiefly inhabited by Jews, but Syrian, Phoenician and Greek
heathens
also made their home there.“ Here accordingly Jew means one who
worships
the God of the land of Judea, no matter of what race he may claim to
be.
On the very next page, however, he speaks of an “Aryan race,“ in
opposition
to a “Jewish nation“; here consequently Jew denotes a definite, limited
race which has kept itself pure for centuries. And now follows the
profound
remark: “The question whether Christ is of Aryan descent is idle. A man
belongs to the nation in whose midst he has grown up.“ This is what
people
called “science“ in the year of grace 1896! To think that at the close
of the nineteenth century a professor could still be ignorant that the
form of the head and the structure of the brain exercise quite decisive
influence upon the form and structure of the thoughts, so that the
influence
of the surroundings, however great it may be estimated to be, is yet by
this initial fact of the physical tendencies confined to definite
capacities
and possibilities, in other words, has definite paths marked out for it
to follow! To think that he could fail to know that the shape of the
skull
in particular is one of those characteristics which are inherited with
ineradicable persistency, so that races are distinguished by
craniological
measurements, and, in the case of mixed races, the original elements
which
occur by atavism become still manifest to the investigator! He could
believe
that the so-called soul has its abode outside the body, and leads the
latter
like a puppet by the nose. O Middle Ages! when will your night leave
us?
When will men understand that form is not an unimportant accident, a
mere
chance, but an expression of the innermost being? that in this very
point
the two worlds, the inner and the outer, the visible and the invisible,
touch? I have spoken of the human personality as the mysterium
magnum
of existence; now this inscrutable wonder shows itself in its visible
form
to the eye and
211 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
the investigating understanding. And
exactly as the possible forms of a building are determined and limited
in essential points by the nature of the building material, so the
possible
form of a human being, his inner and his outer, are defined in
decisively
essential points by the inherited material of which this new
personality
is composed. It certainly may happen that too much importance is
attached
to the idea of race: we detract thereby from the autonomy of
personality
and run the risk of undervaluing the great power of ideas; besides,
this
whole question of race is infinitely more complicated than the layman
imagines;
it belongs wholly to the sphere of anthropological anatomy and cannot
be
solved by any dicta of the authorities on language and history. Yet it
will not do simply to put race aside as a negligible quantity; still
less
will it do to proclaim anything directly false about race and to let
such
an historical lie crystallise into an indisputable dogma. Whoever makes
the assertion that Christ was a Jew is either ignorant or insincere:
ignorant
when he confuses religion and race, insincere when he knows the history
of Galilee and partly conceals, partly distorts the very entangled
facts
in favour of his religious prejudices or, it may be, to curry favour
with
the Jews. * The probability that Christ was no Jew, that He had not a
drop
of genuinely Jewish
*
How
is one, for example, to explain the fact that Renan, who in his Vie
de Jésus, published in 1863, says it is impossible even to
make
suppositions about the race to which Christ by blood belonged (see
chap. ii.), in the fifth volume of his Histoire du Peuple
d'Israël,
finished in 1891, makes the categorical assertion, “Jésus
était
un Juif,“ and attacks with unwonted bitterness those who dare doubt the
fact? Is it to be supposed that the Alliance Israélite,
with
which Renan was so closely connected in the last years of his life, had
not had something to do with this? In the nineteenth century we have
heard
so much fine talk about the freedom of speech, the freedom of science,
&c.; in reality, however, we have been worse enslaved than in the
eighteenth
century; for in addition to the tyrants who have really never been
disarmed,
new and worse ones have arisen. The former tyranny could, with all its
bitter injustice, strengthen the character: the new, which is a tyranny
proceeding from and aiming at money, degrades to the lowest depth of
bondage.
212 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
blood in his veins, is so great that
it is almost equivalent to a certainty. To what race did He belong?
This
is a question that cannot be answered at all. Since the land lay
between
Phoenicia and Syria, which in its south-western portion was strongly
imbued
with Semitic blood, and in addition had never been quite cleared of its
former mixed-Israelitish (but at no time Jewish) population, the
probability
of a descent principally Semitic is very great. But whoever has even
casually
glanced at the race-babel of the Assyrian empire * and then learns that
colonists from all parts of this empire settled in that former home of
Israel, will be baffled by the question. It is indeed possible that in
some of these groups of colonists there prevailed a tradition of
marrying
among themselves, whereby a tribe would have kept itself pure; that
this,
however, should have been kept up more than five hundred years is
almost
unthinkable; the very conversion to the Jewish faith had gradually
obliterated
those tribal differences which at first had been maintained by
religious
customs brought from their old homes (2 Kings, xvii. 29). We
hear
that in later times Greeks too migrated thither; in any case they
belonged
to the poorest classes, and accepted immediately the “god of the
country“!
Only one assertion can therefore be made on a sound historical basis:
in
that whole region there was only one single pure race, a race which by
painfully scrupulous measures protected itself from all mingling with
other
nations — the Jewish; that Jesus Christ did not belong to it can be
regarded
as certain. Every further statement is hypothetical.
This result, though
essentially negative, is of great value; it means an important
contribution
to the right knowledge of the personality of Christ, and at the same
time
to the understanding of its effectiveness up to the present day as well
as to the disentanglement of the
* Cf.
Hugo Winckler: Die Völker Vorderasiens, 1900.
213
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
wildly confused clue of contradictory
ideas and false conceptions, which has wound itself around the simple,
transparent truth. It is time to go deeper. The outward connection is
less
important than the inner; now and now only do we come to the decisive
question:
how far does Christ as a moral fact belong to Judaism and how far does
He not? To fix this once for all, we shall have to make a series of
important
distinctions, for which I beg the fullest attention of the reader.
RELIGION
Christ is, quite
generally
— indeed, perhaps universally — represented as the perfecter of
Judaism,
that is to say, of the religious ideas of the Jews. * Even the orthodox
Jews, though they cannot exactly honour Him as the perfecter, behold in
Him an offshoot from their tree and proudly regard all Christianity as
an appendix to Judaism. That, I am firmly convinced, is a mistake; it
is
an inherited delusion, one of those opinions that we drink in with our
mother's milk and about which in consequence the free-thinker never
comes
to his senses any more than the strictly orthodox Churchman. Certainly
Christ stood in direct relation to Judaism, and the influence of
Judaism,
in the first place upon the moulding of His personality and in a still
higher degree upon the development and history of Christianity is so
great,
definite and essential, that every attempt to deny it must lead to
nonsensical
results; but this influence is only in the smallest degree a religious
one. Therein lies the heart of the error.
We are accustomed
to regard the Jewish people as the religious people above all others:
as
a matter of fact in
*
The
great legal authority Jhering is a praiseworthy exception. In his Vorgeschichte
der Indoeuropäer, p. 300, he says: “The doctrine of Christ did
not spring from his native soil, Christianity is rather an overcoming
of
Judaism; there is even in his origin something of the Aryan in Christ.“
214
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
comparison with the Indo-European races
it is quite stunted in its religious growth. In this respect what
Darwin
calls “arrest of development“ has taken place in the case of the Jews,
an arrest of the growth of the faculties, a dying in the bud. Moreover
all the branches of the Semitic stem, though otherwise rich in talents,
were extraordinarily poor in religious instinct; this is the
“hard-heartedness“
of which the more important men among them constantly complain. * How
different
the Aryan! Even the oldest documents (which go back far beyond the
Jewish)
present him to us as earnestly following a vague impulse which forces
him
to investigate in his own heart. He is joyous, full of animal spirits,
ambitious, thoughtless, he drinks and gambles, he hunts and robs; but
suddenly
he begins to think: the great riddle of existence holds him absolutely
spellbound, not, however, as a purely rationalistic problem — whence is
this world? whence came I? questions to which a purely logical and
therefore
unsatisfactory answer would require to be given — but as a direct
compelling
need of life. Not to understand, but to be, that is the point to which
he is impelled. Not the past with its litany of cause and effect, but
the
present, the everlasting present holds his astonished mind spellbound.
And he feels that it is only when he has bridged the gulf between
himself
and all that surrounds him, when he recognises himself — the one thing
that he directly knows — in every phenomenon and finds again every
phenomenon
in himself, when he has, so to speak, put the world and himself in
harmony,
that he can hope to listen with his own ear to the weaving of the
everlasting
work and bear in his own heart the mysterious music of existence. And
in
order that he may find this harmony, he utters
*
“The
Semites have much superstition, but little religion,“ says Robertson
Smith,
one of the greatest authorities. (See The Prophets of Israel,
p.
33.)
215
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
his own song, tries it in all tones,
practises all melodies; then he listens with reverence. And not
unanswered
is his call: he hears mysterious voices; all nature becomes alive,
everything
in her that is related to man begins to stir. He sinks in reverence
upon
his knees, does not fancy that he is wise, does not believe that he
knows
the origin and finality of the world, yet has faint forebodings of a
loftier
vocation, discovers in himself the germ of immeasurable destinies, “the
seed of immortality.“ This is, however, no mere dream, but a living
conviction,
a faith, and like everything living, it in its turn begets life. The
heroes
of his race and his holy men he sees as “supermen“ (as Goethe says) [**]
hovering
high above the earth; he wills to be like them, for he too is impelled
onward and upward, and now he knows from what a deep inner well they
drew
the strength to be great. — Now this glance into the unfathomable
depths
of his own soul, this longing to soar upwards, this is religion.
Religion
has primarily nothing to do either with superstition or with morals; it
is a state of mind. And because the religious man is in direct contact
with a world beyond reason, he is thinker and poet: he appears
consciously
as a creator; he toils unremittingly at the noble Sisyphus work of
giving
visible shape to the Invisible, of making the Unthinkable capable of
being
thought; * we never find with him a hard and fast chronological
cosmogony
and theogony, he has inherited too lively a feeling of the Infinite for
that; his conceptions remain in flux and never grow rigid; old ones are
replaced by new; gods, honoured in one century, are in another scarcely
known by name. Yet the great facts of knowledge, once firmly acquired,
are
*
Herder
says well, “Man alone is in opposition to himself and the earth; for
the
most fully developed creature among all her organisations is at the
same
time the least developed in his own new capacity... He represents
therefore
two worlds at once and this causes the apparent duplicity of his
being.“
— Ideen zur Geschichte der Menscheit, Teil 1., Buch V.,
Abschnitt
6.
[** German: Übermensch. See Goethe's Faust.]
216
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
never again lost, and more than all
that fundamental truth which the Rigveda centuries and centuries before
Christ tried thus to express, “The root of existence, the wise found in
the heart“ — a conviction which in the nineteenth century has been
almost
identically expressed by Goethe:
- Ist nicht der Kern der Natur
- Menschen im Herzen? *
That is religion! — Now this very
tendency,
this state of mind, this instinct, “to seek the core of nature in the
heart,“
the Jews lack to a startling degree. They are born rationalists. Reason
is strong in them, the will enormously developed, their imaginative and
creative powers, on the other hand, peculiarly limited. Their scanty
mythically
religious conceptions, indeed even their commandments, customs and
ordinances
of worship, they borrowed without exception from abroad, they reduced
everything
to a minimum † which they kept rigidly unaltered; the creative element,
the real inner life is almost totally wanting in them; at the best it
bears,
in relation to the infinitely rich religious life of the Aryans, which
includes all the highest thought and poetical invention of these
peoples,
like the lingual sounds referred to above, a ratio of 2 to 7. Consider
what a luxuriant growth of magnificent religious conceptions and ideas,
and in addition, what art and philosophy, thanks to the Greeks and
Teutonic
races, sprang up upon the soil of Christianity and then ask with what
images
and thoughts the so-called religious nation of the Jews has in the same
space of time enriched mankind! Spinoza's Geometric Ethics (a
false,
still-born adaptation of a brilliant and pregnant thought of Descartes)
seems to me in reality the most cruel mockery of the Talmud
*
Is
not the core of nature / In the heart of man?
† For
details, see chap. v.
217
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
morality and has in any case still less
to do with religion than the Ten Commandments of Moses, which were
probably
derived from Egypt. * No, the power of Judaism which commands respect
lies
in quite another sphere; I shall speak of it immediately.
But how then was
it possible to let our judgment be so befogged as to consider the Jews
a religious people?
In the first place
it was the Jews themselves, who from time immemorial assured us with
the
greatest vehemence and volubility, that they were “God's people“; even
a free-thinking Jew like the philosopher Philo makes the bold assertion
that the Israelites alone were “men in the true sense“; † the good
stupid
Indo-Teutonic peoples believed them. But how difficult it became for
them
to do so is proved by the course of history and the statements of all
their
most important men. This credulity was only rendered possible by the
Christian
interpreters of the Script making the whole history of Judah a
Theodicy,
in which the crucifixion of Christ forms the culminating point. Even
Schiller
(Die Sendung Moses) seems to think that Providence broke up the
Jewish nation, as soon as it had accomplished the work given it to do!
Here the authorities overlooked the telling fact that Judaism paid not
the slightest attention to the existence of Christ, that the oldest
Jewish
historians do not once mention His name; and to this has now to be
added
the fact that this peculiar people after two thousand years still lives
and manifests great prosperity; never, not even in Alexandria, has the
lot of the Jews been so bright as it is to-day. Finally a third
prejudice,
derived fundamentally from the philosophic workshops of Greece, had
some
influence; according to it monotheism, i.e., the idea of a
single
inseparable God, was supposed to be the symptom
* See
chap. cxxv. of the Book of the Dead.
†
Quoted
by Graetz, as above, i. 634‚ without indication of the passage.
218
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
of a higher religion; that is altogether
a rationalistic conclusion; arithmetic has nothing to do with religion;
monotheism can signify an impoverishment as well as an ennobling of
religious
life. Besides, two objections may be urged against this fatal
prejudice,
which has contributed perhaps more than anything else to the delusion
of
a religious superiority of the Jews; in the first place, the fact that
the Jews, as long as they formed a nation and their religion still
possessed
a spark of fresh life, were not monotheists but polytheists, for whom
every
little land and every little tribe had its own God; secondly, that the
Indo-Europeans by purely religious ways had attained to conceptions of
an individual Divinity that were infinitely more sublime than the
painfully
stunted idea which the Jews had formed of the Creator of the world. *
*
I
do not require to adduce evidence of the polytheism of the Jews; one
finds
it in every scientific work and besides on every other page of the Old
Testament; see chap. v.
Even
in the Psalms “all the Gods“ are called upon to worship
Jehovah;
Jehovah is only in so far the “one God“ for later Jews, as the Jews (as
Philo just told us) are “the only men in the real sense.“ Robertson
Smith,
whose History of the Semites is regarded as a scientific and
fundamental
book, testifies that monotheism did not proceed from an original
religious
tendency of the Semitic spirit, but is essentially a political result!!
(See p. 74 of the work quoted.) — With regard to the monotheism
of the Indo-Europeans I make the following brief remarks. The Brahman
of
the Indian philosophers is beyond doubt the greatest religious thought
ever conceived; with regard to the pure monotheism of the Persians we
can
obtain information in Darmesteter (The Zend-Avesta, I. lxxxii.
ff.);
the Greek had however been on the same path, as Ernst Curtius
testifies,
“I have learned much that is new, particularly what a stronghold of the
monotheistic view of God Olympia was and what a moral world-power the
Zeus
of Phidias has been“ (Letter to Gelzer of Jan. 1, 1896, published in
the
Deutsche
Revue, 1897, p. 241). Besides we can refer here to the best of all
witnesses. The Apostle Paul says (Romans, i. 21): “The Romans
knew
that there is one God“; and the churchfather Augustine shows, in the
eleventh
chapter of the 4th book of his De civitate Dei, that according
to
the views of the educated Romans of his time, the magni doctores
paganorum,
Jupiter was the one and only God, while the other divinities only
demonstrated
some of his “virtutes.“ Augustine employed the view which was already
prevalent,
to make it clear to the heathens that it would be no trouble for them
to
adopt the belief in a single God and to give up the others. Haec si
ita sint, quid perderent si unum Deum colerent prudentiore compendio?
(the
219 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
I shall have repeated
occasion to return to these questions, particularly in the sections
dealing
with the entry of the Jews into western history and with the origin of
the Christian Church. In the meantime I hope I have succeeded in
removing
to some extent the preconceived opinion of the special religiousness of
Judaism. I think the reader of the orthodox Christian Neander will
henceforth
shake his head sceptically when he finds the assertion that the advent
of Christ forms the “central point“ of the religious life of the Jews,
that
recommendation to
believe
in a single God “because it simplifies matters“ is a touching feature
of
the golden childhood of the Christian Church!). And what Augustine
demonstrates
in the case of the educated heathen, Tertullian asserts of the
uneducated
people in general. “Everybody,“ he says, “believes only in a single
God,
and one never hears the Gods invoked in the plural, but only as 'Great
God'! 'Good God'! 'As God will'! 'God be with you'! 'God bless you'!“
This
Tertullian regards as the evidence of a fundamentally monotheistic
soul:
“O testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae!“ (Apologeticus,
xvii). [Giordano Bruno in his Spaccio de la bestia trionfante,
ed.
Lagarde, p. 532, has some beautiful remarks on the monotheism of the
ancients.]
— In order that in a matter of such significance nothing may remain
obscure,
I must add that Curtius, Paul, Augustine and Tertullian are all four
labouring
under a thorough delusion, when they see in these things a proof of
monotheism
in the sense of Semitic materialism; their judgment is here dimmed by
the
influence of Christian ideas. The conception “the Divine“ which we see
in the Sanscrit neuter Brahman and in the Greek neuter θείον,
as well as in the German neuter Gott, which only at a later time in
consequence
of Christian influence was regarded as a masculine (see Kluge's
Etymologisches
Wörterbuch), cannot be identified at all with the personal
world-creator
of the Jews. In this case one can say of all the Aryans who are not
influenced
by the Semitic spirit what Professor Erwin Rohde proves for the
Hellenes:
“The view that the Greeks had a tendency to monotheism (in the Jewish
sense)
is based on a wrong interpretation.... It is not a unity of the divine
person, but a uniformity of divine entity, a divinity living uniformly
in many Gods, something universally divine in the presence of which the
Greek stands when he enters into religious contact with the Gods“ (Die
Religion der Griechen in the Bayreuther Blätter, 1895,
p. 213). Very characteristic are the words of Luther in this
connection,
“In creation and in works (to reckon from without to the creature) we
Christians
are at one with the Turks; for we say too that there is not more than
one
single God. But we say, this is not enough, that we only believe that
there
is one single God.“
220 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
“in the whole organism of this religion
and people's history it was of inner necessity determined,“ &c.
&c.
* As for the oratorical flourishes of the free-thinker Renan: Le
Christianisme
est le chef-d'oeuvre du judaïsme, sa gloire, le
résumé
de son évolution.... Jésus est tout entier dans
Isaïe,
&c., † he will smile over them with just a shade of indignation;
and
I fear he will burst into Homeric laughter when the orthodox Jew Graetz
assures him that the teaching of Christ is the “old Jewish doctrine in
a new dress,“ that “the time had now come when the fundamental truths
of
Judaism ... the wealth of lofty thoughts concerning God and a holy life
for the individual and the community should flow in upon the emptiness
of the rest of the world, filling it with a rich endowment.“ ‡
* Allgemeine
Geschichte der christlichen Religion, 4th ed. i. 46.
† Histoire
du Peuple d'Israël, v. 415, ii. 539, &c. The enormity of
the
assertion in regard to Isaiah becomes clear from the fact that Renan
himself
describes and praises this prophet as a “littérateur“ and a
“journaliste,“
and that he proves in detail what a purely political rôle
this important man played. “Not a line from his pen, which was not in
the
service of a question of the day or an interest of the moment“ (ii.
481).
And we are to believe that in this very man the whole personality of
Jesus
Christ is inherent? It is quite as unjustifiable (unfortunately in
others
as well as in Renan) to quote single verses from Isaiah, to
make
it appear as if Judaism had aimed at a universal religion. Thus xlix.
6,
is quoted, where Jehovah says to Israel, “I will also give thee for a
light
to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the
earth,“
and nothing is said of the fact that in the course of the chapter the
explanation
is given that the Gentiles shall become the slaves of the Jews and
their
Kings and Princesses shall “bow down to them with their face toward the
earth“ and “lick up the dust of their feet.“ And this we are to regard
as a sublime universal religion! Exactly the same is the case with the
constantly quoted chapter lx. where we find first the words, “The
Gentiles
shall come to thy light,“ but afterwards with an honesty for which one
is thankful, “The nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall
perish,
yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted“! Moreover the Gentiles are
told in this passage to bring all their gold and treasures to
Jerusalem,
for the Jews shall “inherit the land for ever.“ To think of any one
venturing
to put such political pamphleteering on a parallel with the teaching of
Christ!
‡ As
above, i. 570. It has often been asserted that the Jews have little
sense
of humour: that seems to be true, at least of individuals;
221
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
CHRIST NOT A JEW
Whoever wishes to
see the revelation of Christ must passionately tear this darkest of
veils
from his eyes. His advent is not the perfecting of the Jewish religion
but its negation. It was in the very place where feelings played the
least
part in religious conceptions that a new religious ideal appeared,
which
— unlike the other great attempts further to explain the inner life, by
thoughts or by images — laid the whole burthen of this “life in spirit
and in truth“ upon the feelings. The relation to the Jewish religion
could
at most be regarded as a reaction; the feelings are, as we have said,
the
fountain head of all genuine religion; this spring which the Jews had
well-nigh
choked with their formalism and hard-hearted rationalism Christ opened
up. Few things let us see so deeply into the divine heart of Christ as
His attitude towards the Jewish religious ordinances. He observed them,
but without zeal and without laying any stress upon them; at best they
are but a vessel, which, holding nothing, would remain empty; and as
soon
as an ordinance bars His road, He breaks it without the least scruple,
but at the same time calmly and without anger: for what has all this to
do with religion? “Man * is Lord
just imagine the
“wealth“
of these crassly ignorant unimaginative scribes and the “emptiness“ of
the Hellenes! Graetz has not much regard for the personality of Christ;
the highest appreciation to which he deigns to rise is as follows:
“Jesus
may also have possessed a sympathetic nature that won hearts, whereby
His
words could make an impression“ (i. 576). The learned Professor of
Breslau
regards the crucifixion as the result of a “misunderstanding.“ With
regard
to the Jews who afterwards went over to Christianity Graetz is of
opinion
that it was done for their material advantages and because the belief
in
the Crucified One “was taken into the bargain as something unessential“
(ii. 30). Is that still true? We knew from the Old Testament that the
covenant
with Jehovah was a contract with obligations on both sides, but what
can
be “bargained“ in regard to Christ I cannot understand.
* The
following information about the expression “son of man“ is important:
“The
Messianic interpretation of the expression 'son
222
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
also of the Sabbath“: for the Jew
Jehovah
alone had been Lord — man his slave. With regard to the Jewish laws in
relation to food (so important a point in their religion that the
quarrel
with regard to its obligatoriness continued on into the early Christian
times) Christ says: “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man
but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man. For those
things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart: and
they
defile the man.“ * In this connection consider too how Christ uses Holy
Scripture. He speaks of it with reverence but without fanaticism. It is
indeed very remarkable how He makes Scripture serve His purpose; over
it
too He feels Himself “Lord“ and transforms it, when necessary, into its
opposite. His doctrine is that the “whole law and the prophets“ may be
summed up in the one command: Love God and thy neighbour. That sounds
almost
like sublime irony, especially when we consider that Christ on this
occasion
never once mentions “the fear of God,“ which (and not the love of God)
forms the basis of the whole Jewish religion. “The fear of the Lord is
the beginning of wisdom,“ sings the Psalmist. “Hide thee in the dust
for
fear of the Lord, and for the glory of His majesty,“ Isaiah calls to
the
Israelites, and even Jeremiah seemed to have forgotten that there is a
law according to which man “shall love God with all his heart, with all
his soul, with all his strength, and with all his mind,“ †
of man' originated
from
the Greek translators of the Gospel. As Jesus spoke Aramaic, He said
not ο υίός του άνθρώπον
but barnascha. But that means man and nothing more; the Arameans had no
other expression for the idea“ (Wellhausen:
Israelitische
und jüdische
Geschichte, 3rd ed. p. 381).
* “If
man is impure, he is so because he speaks what is untrue,“ said the
sacrificial
ordinances of the Aryan Indians, one thousand years before Christ (Satapatha-Brâhmana,
1st verse of the 1st division of the 1st book.)
† In
the fifth book of Moses (Deuteronomy vi. 5) are to be found
words
similar to these quoted from Christ's sayings (from Matthew
xxii.
37), but — we must look at the context! Before the command-
223 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
and had represented Jehovah as saying
to His people, “I will put my fear in their hearts that they shall not
depart from me; they shall fear me for ever“; it is only when the Jews
fear Him that He “will not turn away from them to do them good,“
&c.
We find that Christ also frequently changes the meaning of the words of
Scripture in a similar manner. Now if we see on the one hand a God of
mercy
and on the other a hard-hearted Jehovah, * on the one hand the doctrine
which teaches us to love our “heavenly Father“ with all our heart and
on
the other “servants,“ who are enjoined “to fear the lord“ as their
ment to love (to our
mind
a peculiar conception — to love by command) stands as the first and
most
important commandment (verse 2), “Thou shalt fear the Lord, thy God, to
keep all his statutes and his commandments“; the commandment to love is
only one among other commandments which the Jew shall observe and
immediately
after it comes the reward for this love (verse 10 ff.). “I shall give
thee
great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, and houses full of
all
good things which thou filledst not, and wells digged which thou
diggedst
not, vineyards and olive-trees, which thou plantedst not, &c“ That
kind of love may be compared to the love which underlies so many
marriages
at the present day! In any case the “love of one's neighbour“ would
appear
in a peculiar light, if one did not know that according to the Jewish
law
only the Jew is a “neighbour“ of the Jew; as is expressed in the same
place,
chap. vii. 16, “Thou shalt consume all the peoples which the Lord thy
God
shall deliver thee!“ This commentary to the commandment to “love one's
neighbour“ makes every further remark superfluous. But in order that no
one may be in doubt as to what the Jews later meant by the command to
love
God with the whole heart, I shall quote the commentary of the Talmud
(Jomah, Div. 8) to that part of the law, Deuteronomy,
vi.
5: “The teaching of this is: thy behaviour shall be such that the name
of God shall be loved through you; man shall in fact occupy himself
with
the study of Holy Scripture and of the Mishna and have intercourse with
learned and wise men; his language shall be gentle, his other conduct
proper,
and in commerce and business with his fellow men he shall strive after
honesty and uprightness. What will people then say? Hail to this man
who
has devoted himself to the study of the sacred doctrine!“ In the book Sota
of the Jerusalem Talmud (v. 5) one finds a somewhat more reasonable but
no less prosaic commentary. — This is the orthodox Jewish
interpretation
of the commandment, “Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy heart“! Is
it
not the most unworthy playing with words to assert that Christ taught
the
same doctrine as the Thora?
* The
orthodox Jew Montefiore, Religion of the Ancient Hebrews
(1893),
p. 442, admits that the thought, “God is love,“ does not occur in any
purely
Hebrew work of any time.
224
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
first duty, * we may well ask what
meaning
can there be in characterising the one personal philosophy as the work,
as the perfection of the other? This is sophistry, not truth. Christ
himself
has said in plain words, “Whoever is not with me is against me“; no
fact
in the world is so completely against Him as the Jewish religion,
indeed
the whole Jewish conception of religion — from earliest times to the
present
day.
And yet the Jewish
religion has in this connection formed a fine soil, better than any
other,
for the growth of a new religious ideal, that is, for a new conception
of God.
What meant poverty
for others became in fact for Christ a source of the richest gifts. For
example, the fearful, to us almost inconceivable, dreariness of Jewish
life — without art, without philosophy, without science — from which
the
more gifted Jews fled in crowds to foreign parts, was an absolutely
indispensable
element for his simple, holy life. The Jewish life offered almost
nothing
— nothing but the family life — to the feelings of the individual. And
thus the richest mind that ever lived could sink into itself, and find
nourishment only in its own inmost depths. “Blessed are the poor in
spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.“ Perhaps it was only in these
dreary
surroundings that it was possible to discover that conversion of will
as
the first step towards a new ideal of mankind; only here where the
“Lord
of hosts“ ruled without pity, that the heavenly presentiment God is
love
could be elevated to a certainty.
The following is,
however, the most important point in this discussion.
The peculiar mental
characteristic of the Jews, their
*
Montefiore
and others dispute the statement that the relation of Israel to Jehovah
was that of servants to their master, but Scripture says so clearly in
many places, e.g., Leviticus xxv. 55: “The children of Israel
are
servants, they are my servants whom I brought forth out of the land of
Egypt,“ and the literal translation of the Hebrew text would be slave!
(Cf. the literal translation by Louis Segond.)
225 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
lack of imagination, brought about by
the tyrannical predominance of the will, had led them to a strange
abstract
materialism. Being materialists, the Jews were most prone, like all
Semites,
to crass idolatry; we see them ever and anon setting up images and
bowing
down before them; the moral struggle which their great men for
centuries
waged against it is an heroic page in the history of the human power of
will. But the will which was not balanced by imagination shot as usual
far beyond the mark; every image, in fact frequently everything that is
at all the “work of hands,“ contains for the Jew of the Old Testament
the
danger of becoming a worshipped idol. Not even the coins may bear a
human
head or an allegorical figure, not even the flags an emblem. And so all
non-Jews are to the Jews “worshippers of idols.“ And from this fact
again
arose, by the way, a Christian misconception which was not dissipated
till
the last years of the nineteenth century, and then only for the
specialist,
not for the mass of the educated. As a matter of fact, the Semites are
probably the only people in the whole earth who ever were and could be
genuine idolators. In no branch of the Indo-European family has there
ever
been idolatry. The unmixed Aryan Indians, as also the Eranians, had
never
either image or temple; they would have been incapable even of
understanding
the crassly materialistic sediment of Semitic idolatry in the Jewish
ark
of the covenant with its Egyptian sphinxes; neither the Teutons nor the
Celts nor the Slavs worshipped images. And where did the Hellenic Zeus
live? Where Athene? In poetry, in the imagination, up in cloud-capped
Olympus,
but never in this or that temple. In honour of the god Phidias created
his immortal work, in honour of the gods the numerous little images
were
made which adorned every house and filled it with the living conception
of higher beings. To the Jew, however, that seemed
226 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
idolatry! The will being with them
predominant,
they regarded each thing only from the point of view of its utility; it
was incomprehensible to them that a man should put anything beautiful
before
his eyes, to elevate and console himself therewith, to provide food for
his mind, to awaken his religious sense. Similarly, too, the Christians
have at a later time looked upon images of Buddha as idols: but the
Buddhists
recognise no God, much less an idol; these statues served as a stimulus
to contemplation and alienation from the world. Indeed ethnologers have
lately been beginning to question the possibility of there ever being a
people so primitive as to worship so-called fetishes as idols. Formerly
this was simply taken for granted; now it is being found in more and
more
cases that these children of nature attach the most complicated
symbolical
conceptions to their fetishes. It seems as if the Semites were the only
human race that had succeeded in making golden calves, iron serpents,
&c.,
and then worshipping them. * And as the Israelites even at that time
were
much more highly developed than the Australasian negroes of to-day, we
conclude that such aberrations on their part must be put down not to
immaturity
of judgment, but to some onesidedness of their intellect: this
onesidedness
was the enormous predominance of will. The will as such lacks not
merely
all imagination, but all reflection; to it only one thing is natural,
to
precipitate itself upon, and to grasp the present. And so for no people
was it so difficult as it was for the people of Israel, to rise to a
high
conception of the Divine, and for none was it so hard to keep this
conception
pure. But strength is steeled in the fray: the most unreligious people
in the world created in its need the foundation of a new and most
sublime
conception
*
It
is scarcely necessary to call the reader's attention to the fact that
the
Egyptian and Syrian forms of worship from which the Jews took the idea
of the ox and the serpent were purely symbolical.
227 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
of God, which has become the common
property of all civilised mankind. For on this foundation Christ built;
He could do so, thanks to that “abstract materialism“ which He found
around
Him. Elsewhere religions were choked by the richness of their
mythologies;
here there was no mythology at all. Elsewhere every god possessed so
distinct
a physiognomy, had been made by poetry and the plastic arts so
thoroughly
individual, that no one could have changed him over night; or, on the
other
hand (as is the case with Brahman in India) the conception of him had
been
gradually so sublimated that nothing remained from which to create a
new
living form. Neither of these two things had happened with the Jews:
Jehovah
was in truth a remarkably concrete, indeed an altogether historical
conception,
and in so far a much more tangible figure than the imaginative Aryan
had
ever possessed; at the same time it was forbidden to represent Him
either
by image or word. * Hence the religious genius of mankind found here a
tabula
rasa. Christ required to destroy the historical Jehovah just as
little
as the Jewish “law“; neither the one nor the other has an immediate
relation
to real religion; but just as He in point of fact by that inner
“conversion“
transformed the so-called law into a fundamentally new law, so He used
the concrete abstraction of the Jewish God in order to give the world a
quite new conception of God. We speak of anthropomorphism! Can then man
act and think otherwise than as an anthropos? This new conception of
the
Godhead differed, however, from other sublime intuitions in this, that
the image was created not with the brilliant colours of symbolism nor
with
the etching-needle of thought, but was caught as it were on a mirror
*
When
at a very late period the Jews could not quite resist the impulse to
presentation,
they sought to conceal the want of imaginative power by Oriental
verbiage.
We can see an example of it in chap. i. of Ezekiel.
228 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
in the innermost mind, and became
henceforth
a direct individual experience to every one that had eyes to see. —
Certain
it is that this new ideal could not have been set up in any other place
than where the conception of God had been fanatically clung to, and yet
left totally undeveloped.
Hitherto we have
directed our attention to what separates or at least distinguishes
Christ
from Judaism; it would be one-sided to leave it at that alone. His fate
and the main tendency of His thought are both closely connected with
genuine
Jewish life and character. He towers above His surroundings, but yet He
belongs to them. Here we have to consider especially two fundamental
features
of the Jewish national character: the historical view of religion and
the
predominance of the will. These two features are, as we shall
immediately
see, genetically related. The former has strongly influenced Christ's
life
and His memory after death; in the latter is rooted His doctrine of
morals.
A study of these two points will throw light on many of the deepest and
most difficult questions in the history of Christianity, as well as on
many of the inexplicable inner contradictions of our religious
tendencies
up to the present day.
HISTORIC
RELIGION
Of the many
Semitic
peoples one only, and that one politically one of the smallest and
weakest,
has maintained itself as a national unity; this small nation has defied
all storms and stands to-day a unique fact among men — without
fatherland,
without a supreme head, scattered all over the world, enrolled among
the
most different nationalities, and yet united and conscious of unity.
This
miracle is the work of a book, the Thora, with all that has
been
added to it by way of supplement up to the present day. But this book
must
be regarded as evidence of a peculiar national soul, which at a critical
229
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
moment was guided in this direction
by individual eminent and far-seeing men. In the next chapter but one I
shall have to enter more fully into the origin and importance of these
canonical writings. In the meantime, I shall merely call attention to
the
fact that the Old Testament is a purely historical work. If we leave
out
of account a few late and altogether unessential additions (like the
socalled
Proverbs
of Solomon), every sentence of these books is historical; the whole
legislation too which they contain is based on history, or has at least
a chronological connection with the events described: “The Lord spake
unto
Moses,“ Aaron's burnt-offering is accepted by the Lord, Aaron's sons
are
killed during the proclamation of the law, &c. &c.; and if it
is
a question of inventing something, the narrator either links it on to a
fictitious story, as in the book of Job, or to a daring
falsification
of history, as in the book of Esther. By this predominance of
the
chronological element the Bible differs from all other known sacred
books.
The religion it contains is an element in the historical narrative and
not vice versa; its moral commandments do not grow with
inherent
necessity out of the depths of the human heart, they are “laws,“ which
were promulgated under definite conditions on fixed days, and which can
be repealed at any time. Compare for a moment the Aryan Indians; they
often
stumbled upon questions concerning the origin of the world, the whence
and the whither, but these were not essential to the uplifting of their
souls to God; this question concerning causes has nothing to do with
their
religion: indeed, far from attaching importance to it, the hymnists
exclaim
almost ironically:
- Who hath perceived from whence
creation
comes?
- He who in Heaven's light upon it
looks,
- He who has made or has not made it
all,
- He knows it! Or does he too know
it not?
*
Goethe, who is often called the “great
Heathen,“
but
* Rigveda,
x. 129, 7.
230
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
who might with greater justice be termed
the “great Aryan,“ gave expression to exactly the same view when he
said,
“Animated inquiry into cause does great harm.“ Similarly the German
natural
scientist of to-day says, “In the Infinite no new end and no beginning
can be sought. However far back we set the origin, the question still
remains
open as to the first of the first, the beginning of the beginning.“ *
The
Jew felt quite differently. He knew as accurately about the creation of
the world as do the wild Indians of South America or the Australian
blacks
to-day. That, however, was not due — as is the case with these — to
want
of enlightenment, but to the fact that the Aryan shepherd's profound,
melancholy
mark of interrogation was never allowed a place in Jewish literature;
his
tyrannous will forbade it, and it was the same will that immediately
silenced
by fanatical dogmatism the scepticism that could not fail to assert
itself
among so gifted a people (see the Koheleth, or Book of
the
Preacher). Whoever would completely possess the “to-day“ must also
grasp
the “yesterday“ out of which it grew. Materialism suffers shipwreck as
soon as it is not consistent; the Jew was taught that by his unerring
instinct;
and just as accurately as our materialists know to-day how thinking
arises
out of the motion of atoms, did he know how God had created the world
and
made man from a clod of earth. Creation, however, is the least thing of
all; the Jew took the myths with which he became acquainted on his
journeys,
stripped them as far as possible of everything mythological and pruned
them down to concrete historical events. † But then, and not till then,
came his masterpiece: from the scanty material common to all Semites ‡
*
Adolf
Bastian, the eminent ethnologist, in his work: Das Beständige
in
den Menschenrassen (1868), p. 28.
† “Les
mythologies étrangères se transforment entre les mains
des
Sémites en récits platement historiques“ (Renan, Israël,
i. 49).
‡ Cf.
the history of creation by the Phoenician Sanchuniathon.
231 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
the Jew constructed a whole history
of the world of which he made himself the centre; and from this moment,
that is, the moment when Jehovah makes the covenant with Abraham, the
fate
of Israel forms the history of the world, indeed, the history of the
whole
cosmos, the one thing about which the Creator of the world troubles
himself.
It is as if the circles always became narrower; at last only the
central
point remains — the “Ego,“ the will has prevailed. That indeed was not
the work of a day; it came about gradually; genuine Judaism, that is,
the
Old Testament in its present form, shaped and established itself only
after
the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity. * And now what
formerly
had been effected with unconscious genius was applied and perfected
consciously:
the union of the past and the future with the present in such a way
that
each individual moment formed a centre on the perfectly straight path,
which the Jewish people had to follow and from which it henceforth
could
not deviate either to right or to left. In the past divine miracles in
favour of the Jews and in the future expectation of the Messiah and
world-empire:
these were the two mutually complementary elements of this view of
history.
The passing moment received a peculiarly living importance from the
fact
that it was seen growing out of the past, as reward or punishment, and
that it was believed to have been exactly foretold in prophecies. By
this
the future itself acquired unexampled reality: it seemed to be
something
tangible. Even should countless promises and prophecies not come true,
† that could always be easily explained. Will looks not too close, but
what it holds it does not let go,
* Seechap.
v. In order to give a fixed point and to reveal drastically the
differences
of mental tendencies, I may mention that this was about three hundred
years
after Homer, scarcely a century before Herodotus.
† For
example, the promise to Abraham in reference to Canaan, “To thee will I
give it, and to thy seed for ever.“
232 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
even if it be but a phantom; the less
the past had given the richer appeared the future; and so much was
possessed
in black and white (particularly in the legend of the Exodus),
that
doubt could not arise. The so-called Jewish “literal adherence to
creed“
is surely quite a different thing from the dogmatic faith of the
Christians:
it is not a faith in abstract inconceivable mysteries and in all kinds
of mythological conceptions, but something quite concrete and
historical.
The relation of the Jews to their God is from the first political. *
Jehovah
promises them the empire of the world — under certain conditions; and
their
historical work is such a marvel of ingenious structure that the Jews
see
their past in the most glowing colours, and everywhere perceive the
protecting
hand of God extended over His chosen people, “over the only men in the
true sense of the word“; and this in spite of the fact that theirs has
been the most wretched and pitiful fate as a people that the annals of
the world can show; for only once under David and Solomon did they
enjoy
half a century of relative prosperity and settled conditions: thus they
possess on all hands proofs of the truth of their faith, and from this
they draw the assurance that what was promised to Abraham many
centuries
before will one day take place in all its fulness. But the divine
promise
was, as I have said, dependent upon conditions. Men could not move
about
in the house, could not eat and drink or walk in the fields, without
thinking
of hundreds of commandments, upon the fulfilment of which the fate of
the
nation depended. As the Psalmist sings of the Jew (Psalm i. 2):
- He placeth his delight
- Upon God's law, and meditates
- On his law day and night. †
* See
Rob. Smith: The Prophets of Israel, pp. 70 and 133.
† In
the Sippurim, a collection of Jewish popular sagas and stories,
it is frequently mentioned that the ordinary uneducated Jew has 613
commandments
to learn by heart. But the Talmud teaches 13,600
233 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
Every few years each of us throws a
voting-paper into the box; otherwise we do not know or hardly know that
our life is of national importance; but the Jew could never forget
that.
His God had promised him, “No people shall withstand thee, till thou
destroyest
it,“ but immediately added, “All the commandments which I command thee,
thou shalt keep!“ God was thus always present to consciousness.
Practically
everything but material possession was forbidden to the Jew; his mind
therefore
was directed to property alone; and it was to God that he had to look
for
the possession of that property. — The man who has never brought home
to
himself the conditions here hastily sketched will have difficulty in
realising
what unanticipated vividness the conception of God acquired under these
conditions. The Jew could not indeed represent Jehovah by images; but
His
working, His daily intervention in the destiny of the world was, so to
speak, a matter of experience; the whole nation indeed lived upon it;
to
meditate upon it was their one intellectual occupation (if not in the
Diaspora,
at least in Palestine).
It was in these
surroundings
that Christ grew up; beyond them He never stepped. Thanks to this
peculiar
historical sense of the Jews He awoke to consciousness as far as
possible
from the all-embracing Aryan cult of nature and its confession tat-tvam-asi
(that thou art also), in the focus of real anthropomorphism, where all
creation was but for man, and all men but for this one chosen people,
that
is, He awoke in the direct presence of God and Divine Providence. He
found
here what He would have found nowhere else in the world: a complete
scaffolding
ready for Him, within which His entirely new conception of God and of
religion
could be built up. After Jesus had lived, nothing remained of the
genuinely
Jewish
laws, obedience to
which
is divine command! (See Dr. Emanuel Schreiber: Der Talmud
vom
Standpunkte des modernen Judentums.)
234 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
idea; now that the temple was built
the scaffolding could be removed. But it had served its purpose, and
the
building would have been unthinkable without it. The God to whom we
pray
to give us our daily bread could only be thought of where a God had
promised
to man the things of this world; men could only pray for forgiveness of
sins to Him who had issued definite commandments. — I almost fear,
however,
that if I here enter into details I may be misunderstood; it is enough
if I have succeeded in giving a general conception of the very peculiar
atmosphere of Judea, for that will enable us to discern that this most
ideal religion would not possess the same life-power if it had not been
built upon the most real, the most materialistic — yes, assuredly the
most
materialistic — religion in the world. It is this and not its supposed
higher religiosity that has made Judaism a religious power of
world-wide
importance.
The matter becomes
still clearer whenever we consider the influence of this historical
faith
upon the fate of Christ.
The most powerful
personality can be influential only when it is understood. This
understanding
may be very incomplete, it may indeed frequently be direct
misunderstanding,
but some community of feeling and thought must form the link of
connection
between the lonely genius and the masses. The thousands that listened
to
the Sermon on the Mount certainly did not understand Christ; how could
that have been possible? They were a poor people, downtrodden and
oppressed
by continual war and discord, systematically stupefied by their
priests;
but the power of his word awakened in the heart of the more gifted
among
them an echo which it would have been impossible to awaken in any other
part of the world: was this to be the Messiah, the promised redeemer
from
their misery and wretchedness? What immeasurable power lay in the
possibility
of such
235
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
a conception! At once the homely,
fleeting
present was linked to the remotest past and the most indubitable
future,
and thereby the present received everlasting importance. It does not
matter
that the Messiah, whom the Jews expected, had not the character which
we
Indo-Europeans attach to this conception; * the idea
*
Even
so orthodox an investigator as Stanton admits that the Jewish idea of
the
Messiah was altogether political (see The Jewish and the Christian
Messiah,
1886, pp. 122 f., 128, &c.). It is well known that theology has
occupied
itself much of late years with the history of the conceptions of the
Messiah.
The principal result of the investigation for us laymen is the proof
that
the Christians, misled by what were specifically Galilean and Samarian
heterodoxies, supplanted the Jewish conception of the coming of the
Messiah
by a view which the Jews never really held. The Jews who were learned
in
Scripture were always indignant at the strained interpretations of the
Old Prophets; now even the Christians admit that the Prophets before
the
exile (and these are the greatest) knew nothing of the expectation of a
Messiah (see, for example, the latest summary account, that of
Paul
Volz:
Die vorexilische Jahveprophetie und der Messias, 1897); the
Old Testament does not even know the word, and one of the most
important
theologists of our time, Paul de Lagarde
(Deutsche
Schriften, p.
53), calls attention to the fact that the expression mâschîach
is not of Hebrew origin at all, but was borrowed at a late time from
Assyria
or Babylon. It is particularly noteworthy also that this expectation of
the Messiah wherever it existed was constantly taking different forms;
in one case a second King David was to come, in another the idea was
one
only of Jewish world-empire in general, then again it is God himself
with
his heavenly judgment “who will put an end at once to those who have
hitherto
held sway and give the people of Israel power for ever, an
all-embracing
empire, in which the just of former times who rise again shall take
part,
while the rebellious are condemned to everlasting shame“ (cf.
Karl
Müller: Kirchengeschichte, i. 55); other Jews again
dispute
whether the Messiah will be a Ben-David or a Ben-Joseph; many believe
there
would be two of them, others are of the opinion that he would be born
in
the Roman Diaspora; but nowhere and at no time do we find the idea of a
suffering Messiah, who by his death redeems us (see Stanton, pp.
122-124). The best, the most cultured and pious Jews have never
entertained
such apocalyptic delusions. In the Talmud (Sabbath, Part 6) we
read,
“Between the present time and the Messianic there is no difference
except
that the pressure, under which Israel pines till then, will cease.“
(Contrast
with this the frightful confusion and complete puerility of the
Messianic
conceptions in the Sanhedrin of the Babylonian Talmud.) I think
that with these remarks I have touched the root of the matter: in the
case
of an absolutely historical religion, like the Jewish, the sure
possession
of the future is just as imperative a necessity as the sure possession
of the
236 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
was there, the belief founded on history
that at any moment a saviour could and must appear from Heaven. In no
other
part of the earth could a single man have this conception, full of
misunderstandings
as it was, of the world-wide importance of Christ. The Saviour would
have
remained a man among men. And in so far I think that the thousands who
soon afterwards cried, “Crucify him, crucify him,“ showed just as much
understanding as those who had piously listened to the Sermon on the
Mount.
Pilate, at other times a hard, cruel judge, could find no fault in
Christ;
* in Hellas and in Rome He would have been honoured as a holy man. But
the Jew lived only in history, to him the “heathen“ idea of morality
and
sanctity was strange, since he knew only a “law,“ and moreover obeyed
this
law for quite practical reasons, namely, to stay the wrath of God and
to
make sure of his future, and so he judged a phenomenon like the
revelation
of Christ from a purely historical standpoint, and became justly filled
with fury, when the promised kingdom, to win which he had suffered and
endured for centuries — for the sake of possessing which he had
separated
himself from all people upon the earth, and had become hated and
despised
of all — when this kingdom, in which he hoped to see all nations in
fetters
and all princes upon their knees “licking the dust,“ was all at once
transformed
from an earthly kingdom into one “not of this world.“ Jehovah had often
promised his people that he would “not betray“ them; but to the Jews
this
was bound to appear be-
past; from the
earliest
times we see this thought of the future inspiring the Jews and it still
inspires them; this unimaginative people gave its expectations various
forms, according to the varying influences of surroundings, essential
only
is the firm ineradicable conviction that the Jews should one day rule
the
world. This is in fact an element of their character, the visible
bodying-forth
of their innermost nature. It is their substitute for mythology.
*
Tertullian
makes the charmingly simple remark: “Pilate was already at heart a
Christian“
(Aplogeticus xxi.).
237 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
trayal. They executed not one only but
many, because they were held to be, or gave themselves out to be, the
promised
Messiah. And rightly too, for the belief in the future was just as much
a pillar of the popular idea as the belief in the past. And now, to
crown
all, this Galilean heterodoxy! To plant the flag of idealism on this
ancient
consecrated seat of the most obstinate materialism! To transform, as if
by magic, the God of vengeance and of war into a God of love and peace!
To teach the stormy will, that stretched out both hands for all the
gold
of the world, that it should throw away what it possessed and seek the
hidden treasure in its own heart!... The Jewish Sanhedrim had seen
farther
than Pilate (and than many thousands of Christian theologists). Not,
indeed,
with full consciousness, but with that unerring instinct, which pure
race
gives, it seized Him who undermined the historical basis of Jewish
life,
by teaching, “Take no heed for the morrow,“ who in each one of His
words
and deeds transformed Judaism into its antithesis, and did not release
Him till He had breathed His last. And thus only, by death, was destiny
fulfilled and the example given. No new faith could be established by
doctrines;
there was at that time no lack of noble and wise teachers of ethics,
but
none has had any power over men; a life had to be lived and this life
had
immediately to receive its place in the great enduring history of the
world
as a fact of universal moment. Only Jewish surroundings suited these
conditions.
And just as the life of Christ could only be lived by the help of
Judaism,
although it was its negation, so too the young Christian Church
developed
a series of ancient Aryan conceptions — of sin, redemption, rebirth,
grace,
&c. (things till then and afterwards quite unknown to the Jews) —
and
gave them a clear and visible form, by introducing them into the Jewish
historical scheme. * No one will ever succeed
*
The
myth of the fall of man stands indeed at the beginning of the first
book
of Moses, but is clearly borrowed, since the Jews never
238
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
in quite freeing the revelation of
Christ
from this Jewish groundwork; it was tried in the first centuries of the
Christian era, but without success, since the thousand features in
which
the personality had revealed its individuality became thereby blurred,
and nothing but an abstraction remained behind. *
WILL
IN THE SEMITIC RACE
Still profounder
is
the influence of the second trait of character.
We have seen that
what I call the historical instinct of the Jews rests above all upon
the
possession of an abnormally developed will. The will in the case of the
Jew attains such superiority that it enthrals and tyrannises over all
other
faculties. And so it is that we find on the one hand extraordinary
achievements,
which would be almost impossible for other men, and on the other,
peculiar
limitations. However that may be, it is certain that we see this very
predominance
of will in Christ at all times: frequently un-Jewish in His individual
utterances, quite Jewish, in so far as the will is almost solely
emphasised.
This feature is like a branching of veins that goes deep and spreads
far:
we find it in every word, in every
understood it and did
not
employ it in their system. He who does not transgress the law is, in
their
eyes, free from sin. Just as little has their expectation of a Messiah
to do with our conception of redemption. See, further, chap.
v. and vol ii chap. vii.
*
That
is the tendency of gnosticism as a whole; this movement finds its most
carefully pondered and noblest expression, as far as I can venture to
express
an opinion, in Marcion (middle of the second century), who was more
filled
with the absolutely new in the Christian ideal than perhaps any
religious
teacher since his time; but in just such a case one sees how fatal it
is
to ignore historical data. (See any Church History. On the other
hand I must warn the student that the three lines which Professor Ranke
devotes to this really great man (Weltgeschichte, ii. 171)
contain
not a single word of what should have been said on this point.) [For a
knowledge of Marcion and gnosticism as a whole Mead's Fragments of
a
Faith Forgotten may be recommended.]
239
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
single conception. By a comparison I
hope to make my meaning clear and comprehensible.
Consider the Hellenic
conception of the Divine and the Human and of their relation to one
another.
Some Gods fight for Troy, others for the Achaeans; while I propitiate
one
part of the Divine I estrange the other; life is a battle, a game, the
noblest may fall, the most miserable gain the victory; morality is in a
way a personal affair, man is lord of his own heart but not of his
destiny;
there is no Providence that protects, punishes and rewards. The Gods
themselves
are in fact not free; Zeus himself must yield to fate. Herodotus says
“Even
a God cannot escape what is destined for him.“ A nation which produces
the Iliad will in a later age produce great investigators of
nature
and great thinkers. For he who looks at nature with open eyes which are
not blinded by selfishness will discover everywhere in it the rule of
law;
the presence of law in the moral sphere is fate for the artist —
predestination
for the philosopher. For the faithful observer of nature the idea of
arbitrariness
is, to begin with, simply impossible; do what he will, he cannot make
up
his mind to impute it even to a God. This philosophical view has been
beautifully
expressed by Here in Goethe's fragment, Achilleis:
- Willkür bleibet ewig verhasst
den Göttern
und Menschen,
- Wenn sie in Thaten sich zeigt,
auch nur
in Worten sich kundgiebt.
- Denn so hoch wir auch stehen, so
ist der
ewigen Götter
- Ewigste Themis * allein, und diese
muss
dauern und walten. †
*
Themis
has degenerated in modern times to an allegory of impartial
jurisdiction,
that is, of an altogether arbitrary agreement, and she is appropriately
represented with veiled eyes; while mythology lived, she represented
the
rule of law in all nature, and the old artists gave her particularly
large,
wide-open eyes.
†
Arbitrariness
remains ever hateful to gods and men, when it reveals itself in deeds
or
even in words only. For however high we may stand, the eternal Themis
of
the eternal Gods alone is, and she must lastingly hold sway.
240
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
On the other hand, the Jewish Jehovah
can be described as the incarnation of arbitrariness. Certainly this
divine
conception appears to us in the Psalms and in Isaiah in
altogether
sublime form; it is also — for the chosen people — a source of high and
serious morality. But what Jehovah is, He is, because He wills to be
so;
He stands above all nature, above every law, the absolute, unlimited
autocrat.
If it pleases Him to choose out from mankind a small people and to show
His favour to it alone, He does so; if He wishes to vex it, He sends it
into slavery; if he, on the other hand, wishes to give it houses which
it has not built and vineyards which it has not planted, He does so and
destroys the innocent possessors; there is no Themis. So too the divine
legislation. Beside moral commands which breathe to some extent high
morality
and humanity, there stand commands which are directly immoral and
inhuman;
* others again determine most trivial points: what one may eat and may
not eat, how one shall wash, &c., in short, everywhere absolute
arbitrariness.
He who sees deeper will not fail to note in this the relationship
between
the old Semitic idolatry and the belief in Jehovah. Considered from the
Indo-European standpoint, Jehovah would in reality be called rather an
idealised idol, or, if we prefer it, an anti-idol, than a god. And yet
this conception of God contains something which could not, any more
than
arbitrariness, be derived from observation of nature, namely, the idea
of a Providence. According to Renan, “the exaggerated belief in a
special
Providence is the basis of the whole Jewish religion.“ † Moreover, with
*
Besides
the countless raids involving wholesale slaughter divinely commanded,
in
which “the heads of the children“ are to be “dashed against the
stones,“
note the cases where command is given to attack with felonious intent
“the
brother, companion, and neighbour“ (Exodus xxxii. 27), and the
disgusting
commands such as in Ezekiel v. 12-15.
† Histoire
du peuple d'Israël, ii. p. 3.
241 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
this freedom of God another freedom
is closely connected, that of the human will. The liberum arbitrium
is decidedly a Semitic conception and in its full development a
specifically
Jewish one; it is inseparably bound up with the particular idea of God.
* Freedom of will implies nothing less than “ever repeated acts of
creation“;
carefully considered it will be clear that this supposition (as soon as
it has to do with the world of phenomena) contradicts not merely all
physical
science, but also all metaphysics, and means a negation of every
transcendent
religion. Here cognition and will stand in strict opposition. Now
wherever
we find limitations of this idea of freedom — in Augustine, Luther,
Voltaire,
Kant, Goethe — we can be sure that an Indo-European reaction against
the
Semitic spirit is taking place. So, for example, when Calderon in the Great
Zenobia lets the wild autocratic Aurelian mock him
- who called the will free.
For — though one must certainly be on
one's
guard against misusing such formulary simplifications — one can still
make
the assertion that the idea of necessity is in all Indo-European races
particularly strongly marked, and is met with again and again in the
most
different spheres; it points to high power of cognition free from
passion;
on the other hand, the idea of arbitrariness, that is, of an
*
We
can trace in every history of Judaism with what very logical fanaticism
the Rabbis still champion the unconditioned and not merely
metaphysically
meant freedom of will. Diderot says: “Les Juifs sont si jaloux de
cette
liberté d'indifférence, qu'ils s'imaginent qu'il est
impossible
de penser sur cette matière autrement qu'eux.“ And how
closely
this idea is connected with the freedom of God and with Providence
becomes
clear from the commotion which arose when Maimonides wished to limit
divine
Providence to mankind and maintained that every leaf was not moved by
it
nor every worm created by its will. — Of the so-called “fundamental
doctrines“
of the famous Talmudist Rabbi Akiba the two first are as follow: (1)
Everything
is supervised by the Providence of God; (2) Freedom of will is
stipulated
(Hirsch Graetz: Gnosticismus und Judentum, 1846, p. 91).
242
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
unlimited sway of will, is specifically
characteristic of the Jew; he reveals an intelligence which in
comparison
with his will-power is very limited. It is not a question here of
abstract
generalisations, but of actual characteristics, which we can still
daily
observe; in the one case intellect is predominant, in the other the
will.
Let me give a
tangible
example from the present. I knew a Jewish scholar, who, as the
competition
in his branch prevented him from earning much money, became a
manufacturer
of soap, and that, too, with great success; but when at a later time
foreign
competition once more took the ground from beneath his feet, all at
once,
though ripe in years, he became dramatic poet and Man of Letters and
made
a fortune at it. There was no question of universal genius in his case;
he was of moderate intellectual abilities and devoid of all
originality;
but with this intellect the will achieved whatever it wished.
The abnormally
developed
will of the Semites can lead to two extremes: either to rigidity, as in
the case of Mohammed, where the idea of the unlimited divine caprice is
predominant; or, as is the case with the Jews, to phenomenal
elasticity,
which is produced by the conception of their own human arbitrariness.
To
the Indo-European both paths are closed. In nature he observes
everywhere
the rule of law, and of himself he knows that he can only achieve his
highest
when he obeys inner need. Of course his will, too, can achieve the
heroic,
but only when his cognition has grasped some idea — religious,
artistic,
philosophic, or one which aims at conquest, command, enrichment,
perhaps
crime; at any rate, in his case the will obeys, it does not command.
Therefore
it is that a moderately gifted Indo-European is so peculiarly
characterless
in comparison with the most poorly gifted Jew. Of ourselves, we should
certainly
243
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
never have arrived at the conception
of a free almighty God and of what may be called an “arbitrary
Providence,“
a Providence, that is, which can decree something in one way, and then
in answer to prayers or from other motives decide in a contrary
direction.
* We do not find that, outside of Judaism, man ever came to the
conception
of a quite intimate and continual personal relation between God and
mankind
— to the conception of a God who would almost seem to be there only for
the sake of man. In truth the old Indo-Aryan Gods are benevolent,
friendly,
we might almost say genial powers; man is their child, not their slave;
he approaches them without fear; when sacrificing he “grasps the right
hand of God“; † the want of humility in presence of God has indeed
filled
many a one with horror: yet as we have seen nowhere do we find the
conception
of capricious autocracy. And with this goes hand in hand remarkable
infidelity;
now this, now that God is worshipped, or, if the Divine is viewed as a
unified principle, then the one school has this idea of it, the other
that
(I remind the reader of the six great philosophically religious systems
of India, all six of which passed as orthodox); the brain in fact works
irresistibly on, producing new images and new shapes, the Infinite is
its
home, freedom its element and creative power its joy. Just consider the
beginning of the following hymn from the Rigveda (6, 9):
- My ear is opened and my eye alert,
- The light awakes within my heart!
- My spirit flies to search in
distant realms:
- What shall I say? of what shall my
verse
sing?
* In
the
case of the Indo-Europeans the Gods are never “creators of the world“;
where the Divine is viewed as creator, as in the case of the Brahman of
the Indians, that refers to a freely metaphysical cognition, not to an
historical and mechanical process, as in Genesis i.; in other
cases
the Gods are viewed as originating “on this side of creation,“ their
birth
and death are spoken of.
†
Oldenberg:
Die
Religion des Veda, p. 310.
244
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
and compare it with the first verses
of any Psalm, for instance, the 76th:
- In Judah is God known: His name is
great
in Israel.
- In Salem also is His tabernacle,
and His
dwelling-place in Sion.
We see what an important element of
faith
the will is. While the Aryan, rich in cognition, “flies to search in
distant
realms,“ the strong-willed Jew makes God pitch His tent once for all in
his own midst. The power of his will to live has not only forged for
the
Jew an anchor of faith, which holds him fast to the ground of
historical
tradition, but it has also inspired him with unshakable confidence in a
personal, directly present God, who is almighty to give and to destroy;
and it has brought him, the man, into a moral relation to this God, in
that God in His all-powerfulness issued commands, which man is free to
follow or neglect. *
THE
PROPHET
There is another
matter
which must not be omitted in this connection: the one-sided
predominance
of the will makes the chronicles of the Jewish people in general
*
If
this were the place for it, I should gladly prove in greater detail
that
this Jewish conception of the almighty God who rules as free Providence
inevitably determines the historical view of this God and that every
genuine
Aryan mind revolts again and again against this. This has caused, for
instance,
the whole tragic mental life of Peter Abelard: in spite of the most
intense
longing for orthodoxy, he cannot adapt his spirit to the religious
materialism
of the Jews. Ever and anon, for example, he comes to the conclusion
that
God does what he does of necessity (and here he could refer for support
to the earlier writings of Augustine, especially his De libero
arbitrio);
this is intellectual anti-Semitism in the highest degree! He denies
also
every action, every motion in the case of God; the working of God is
for
him the coming to pass of an everlasting determination of will: “with
God
there is no sequence of time.“ (See A. Hausrath: Peter
Abelard,
p. 201 f.) With this Providence disappears. — However, what is the use
of seeking for learned proofs? The noble Don
245
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
dreary and ugly; and yet in this
atmosphere
there grew up a series of important men, whose peculiar greatness makes
it impossible to compare them with other intellectual heroes. In the
introduction
to this division I have already spoken of those “disavowers“ of the
Jewish
character, who themselves remained the while such out and out Jews,
from
the crown of their heads to the soles of their feet, that they
contributed
more than anything else to the growth of the most rigid Hebraism; in chap.
v. I shall return to them; only so much must here be said: these
men,
in grasping religious materialism by its most abstract side, raised it
morally to a very great height; their work has paved the way
historically
in essential points for Christ's view of the relation between God and
man.
Moreover, an important feature, which is essentially rooted in Judaism,
shows itself most clearly in them: the historical religion of this
people
lays emphasis not upon the individual, but upon the whole nation; the
individual
can benefit or injure the whole community, but otherwise he is of
little
moment; from this resulted of necessity a markedly socialistic feature
which the Prophets often powerfully express. The individual who attains
to prosperity and wealth, while his brothers starve, falls under the
ban
of God. While Christ in one way represents exactly the opposite
principle,
namely, that of extreme individualism, the redeeming of the individual
by regeneration, His life and His teaching, on the other hand, point
unmistakably
to a condition of things which can only be realised by having all
things
common. The communism of “one flock and one shepherd“ is certainly
different
from the entirely politically coloured, theocratic communism of the
Prophets;
Quixote explains with
pathetic
simplicity to his faithful Sancho, “for God there is no past and no
future,
all is present“ (Book IX. chap. viii.): hereby the immortal Cervantes
expresses
briefly and correctly the unhistorical standpoint of all non-Semites.
246 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
but here again the basis is solely and
characteristically Jewish.
CHRIST
A JEW
Whatever one may
be
inclined to think of these various Jewish conceptions, no one will deny
their greatness, or their capacity to exercise an almost inestimable
influence
upon the moulding of the life of mankind. Nor will any one deny that
the
belief in divine almightiness, in divine Providence and in the freedom
of the human will, * as well as the almost exclusive emphasising of the
moral nature of men and their equality before God (“the last shall be
first“)
are essential elements of the personality of Christ. Far more than the
fact that He starts from the Prophets, far more than His respect for
Jewish
legal enactments, do these fundamental views show us that Christ
belonged
morally to the Jews. Indeed, when we penetrate farther to that central
point in Christ's teaching, to that “conversion of the will,“ then we
must
recognise — as I have already hinted at the beginning of this chapter
in
the comparison with Buddha — that here is something Jewish in contrast
to the Aryan negation of the will. The latter is a fruit of perception,
of too great perception; Christ, on the other hand, addresses Himself
to
men, in whom the will — not the thought, is supreme; what He sees
around
Him is the insatiable, ever-covetous Jewish will that is always
stretching
out both hands; He recognises the might of this will and commands it —
not to be silent, but to take a new direction. Here we must say, Christ
is a Jew, and He can only be understood when we have learned to grasp
critically
these peculiarly Jewish views which He found and made His own.
*
The
latter, however, as it appears, with important limitations, since the
Aryan
idea of grace more than once clearly appears in Christ's words.
247 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
I said just now that
Christ belonged “morally“ to the Jews. This somewhat ambiguous word
“moral“
must here be taken in a narrow sense. For it is just in the moral
application
of these conceptions of God's almightiness and providence, of the
direct
relations between man and God following therefrom, and of the
employment
of the free human will, that the Saviour departed in toto from
the
doctrines of Judaism; that is clear to every one, and I have, moreover,
sought to emphasise it in what has gone before; but the conceptions
themselves,
the frame into which the moral personality fitted itself, and out of
which
it cannot be moved, the unquestioning acceptance of these premisses
regarding
God and man, which by no means belong to the human mind as a matter of
course but are, on the contrary, the absolutely individual achievement
of a definite people in the course of an historical development which
lasted
for centuries: this is the Jewish element in Christ. In the chapters on
Hellenic
Art and Roman Law I have
already
called attention to the power of ideas; here again we have a brilliant
example of it. Whoever lived in the Jewish intellectual world was bound
to come under the influence of Jewish ideas. And though He brought to
the
world an entirely new message, though His life was like the dawn of a
new
morn, though His personality was so divinely great that it revealed to
us a power in the human breast, capable — if it ever should be fully
realised
— of completely changing humanity: yet the personality, the life and
the
message were none the less chained to the fundamental ideas of Judaism;
only in these could they reveal, exercise and proclaim themselves.
248 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
I hope I have
attained
my purpose. Proceeding from the consideration of the personality in its
individual, autonomous import, I have gradually widened the circle, to
reveal the threads of life which connect it with its surroundings. In
this
a certain amplification was unavoidable; the sole subject of this book,
the foundations of the nineteenth century, I have nevertheless not lost
sight of for a single moment. For how could I, an individual, venture
to
approach that age either as chronicler or encyclopaedist? May the Muses
keep me from such madness! On the other hand, I shall attempt to trace
as far as possible the leading ideas, the moulding thoughts of our age;
but these ideas do not fall from Heaven, they link on to the past; new
wine is very often indeed poured into old bottles, and very old, sour
wine,
which nobody would taste, if he knew its origin, into quite new ones;
and
as a matter of fact the curse of confusion weighs heavily upon a
culture
born so late as ours, especially in an age of breathless haste, where
men
have to learn too much to be able to think much. If we wish to become
clear
about ourselves, we must, above all, be quite clear about the
fundamental
thoughts and conceptions which we have inherited from our ancestors. I
hope I have brought it home to the reader how very complex is the
Hellenic
legacy, how peculiarly contradictory the Roman, but at the same time
how
profoundly they affect our life and thought to-day. Now we have seen
that
even the advent of Christ, on the threshold between the old and the new
age, does not present itself to our distant eye in so simple a form
that
we can easily free it from the labyrinth of prejudices, falsehoods and
errors. And yet nothing is more necessary than to see this revelation
of
Christ clearly in the light of truth. For —
249
THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
however unworthy we may show ourselves
of this — our whole culture, thank God, still stands under the sign of
the Cross upon Golgotha. We do see this Cross; but who sees the
Crucified
One? Yet He, and He alone is the living well of all Christianity, of
the
intolerantly dogmatic as well as of that which gives itself out to be
quite
unbelieving. In later ages it will be an eloquent testimony to the
childishness
of our judgment that we have ever doubted it, and that the nineteenth
century
has reared itself on books, which demonstrated that Christianity
originated
by chance, at haphazard, as a “mythological paroxysm,“ as a
“dialectical
antithesis,“ as a necessary result of Judaism, and I know not what
else.
The importance of genius cannot be reckoned high enough: who ventures
to
estimate the influence of Homer upon the mind of man? But Christ was
still
greater. And like the everlasting “hearth-fire“ of the Aryans, so the
torch
of truth which He kindled for us can never be extinguished; though at
times
a shadow of night may wrap manhood far and wide in the folds of
darkness,
yet all that is wanted is one single glowing heart, in order that
thousands
and millions may once more blaze under the bright light of day....
Here,
however, we can and must ask with Christ, “But if the light that is in
thee be darkness, how great is that darkness?“ Even the origin of the
Christian
Church
leads us into the profoundest gloom, and its further history gives us
rather
the impression of a groping about in darkness than of clear seeing in
the
sunlight. How then shall we be able to distinguish what in so-called
Christianity
is spirit of Christ's spirit, and what, on the other hand, is imported
from Hellenic, Jewish, Roman and Egyptian sources, if we have never
come
to see this revelation of Christ in its sublime simplicity? How shall
we
speak about what is Christian in our present confessions, in our
literatures
and arts, in our philosophy
250 THE
REVELATION OF CHRIST
and politics, in our social institutions
and ideals, how shall we separate what is Christian from what is
anti-Christian,
and be able with certainty to decide, what in the movements of the
nineteenth
century can be traced back to Christ and what not, or in how far it is
Christian, whether merely in the form or also in the content, or
perhaps
in content, i.e., in its general tendency, but not with regard
to
the characteristically Jewish form — how shall we, above all, be able
to
sift and separate from the “bread of life“ this specifically Jewish
element
which is so threateningly perilous to our spirit, if the revelation of
Christ does not stand conspicuously before our eyes in its general
outlines,
and if we are not able clearly to distinguish in this image the purely
personal from its historical conditions. This is certainly a most
important
and indispensable foundation for the formation of our judgments and
appreciations.
To pave, to some
modest degree, the way for that result has been the purpose of this
chapter.
End of page. Last
update: June 13th, 2004.
